No Israeli annexation of the West Bank

Evidently Trump warned Israel that if it attempts to annex the West Bank, “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”  This came after the Knesset passed two bills in favor of annexation.

Of course, our Ambassador to Israel, former Baptist preacher and governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, referred to the West Bank as Samaria and Judea, using the Biblical names favored by the right-wing settlers.

While I applaud his statement on annexation, I also find it disheartening that Trump did not criticize the murders, forced displacement, and continuous harassment of West Bank Palestinians by the Israeli settlers.

Needy people

When I go to St. Lukes for an appointment, I invariably get a message asking me about how I was treated.  My gym periodically sends me questionnaires asking me what I thought of the experience.  The Post Office has a device on the counter asking me to press a buttons about the service.  Various phone interactions often include a message asking me to stay on the line to answer questions about my interactions.  

How did we do?  Were you satisfied?  Rank this or that from one to ten, with ten comparable to an orgasm and one approximating being burned at the stake.

Don’t worry.  I am not about to ask you to rank my posts.  Mostly because I don’t want to irritate my readers, but also because I fear the stake-burning comparisons.

Vegetable garden on the White House lawn!

It was not that long ago that conservatives had a hissy fit about First Lady Obama putting a vegetable garden in the White House lawn.  How could she do that?  Why didn’t she respect our history?  It was just wrong.

Self-inflicted wounds

If you were bent on weakening the United States, and you somehow managed to be elected President, what might your strategy be?

Create division among the people?  Engineer tax cuts for the rich while people on the bottom receive increases in medical costs and food prices?

Wreck international trade relations?  Impose tariffs on imports and harm trading partners?

Keep out foreign intellectuals?  Reduce the number of foreign students and alienate the world’s top intellectuals?

Weaken the military?  Order it to get involved in ordinary police work and order it to kill foreign nationals on boats on the high seas?  Appoint an alcoholic pundit to be Secretary of “War”?

Use the Department of Justice to harass personal enemies?

Denigrate beloved national institutions and symbols like national parks, the Medal of Freedom, even the White House?

Go after the press and call it the enemy of the people, then blur the line between truth and fiction?

Appoint idiots to positions of authority?

Alienate our closest allies and suck up to foreign enemies?

Undermine the rule of law?

Deny scientific evidence on global warming and undertake policies that will make it worse?

I sometimes think Trump must be a foreign agent.  His hatred of America has no bounds.  By the end of his term we will be weak, divided, and unable to deal with crises.  That may be true already.

The perfect metaphor

So Trump thinks he is trolling us by posting a computer-generated image of him flying over America and dumping shit on us.  It is the perfect description of what he is doing, and we aren’t even one-fourth of the way through his reign.  

Now he is destroying the American White House.  I’ve seen movies where terrorists try to destroy the White House but never before the President.  I try to imagine what my landlord would have said if I brought in an excavator and starting tearing down a wall of our house on 4th Street in San José.  

I am Trump’s landlord, and so are all the American people.  It is time to evict that tenant.  It’s not his house. 

Rallies, Parades, and Signs

Consider this.  2500 rallies on Saturday.  Rallies around the world.  No one shot.  No one beaten.  Lots of laughter and mockery though.

Today’s Halloween parade in Palmerton was witnessed by thousands of people.  Many clapped; some gave our Democratic entry a thumbs up or smiled and waved.  However one guy wouldn’t let his kids take “Democratic candy” and one guy was bellowing insults.  Guess of the thousands which two I remember.  

Finally, my friend Bill sent me a bunch of memes from Saturday.  They included:

a picture of a butterfly and below it:  “The only orange monarch we want”

“Our huddled masses will beat your fascist asses”

“Honk if you’re not in the Epstein files”

and that photo of Trump and Epstein together with the caption:  “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Our "No Kings" Rally in Lehighton

What a well-organized rally.  About eight people parked cars in a huge lot less than a block away from the rally site.  Extra signs were provided for people who didn’t bring one.  Over 300 people attended.  People came in costume.  I would say that the ratio of drivers who approved to drivers who gave us the finger or thumbs down was about 9 to 1.

My sign said “MAGA–Make Argentina Great Again.”  I only stood about half an hour before my back gave out.  Luckily there was a nearby bench just behind the line where three other elderly participants and I could sit.

At 4 p.m., after the rally, we had a Democratic Party presence in the Lehighton Halloween parade.  We had four women passing out candy, one woman passing out doggie treats, two guys in front carrying a banner that said Carbon County Democrats, and our driver in his 1929 Ford pickup truck.  I sat on the bed of the truck and filled the candy buckets as they were emptied.  My costume was a Dolly Parton wig.  (I got lots of compliments, and one old near-sighted guy tried to flirt with me.  At least I assume he was near-sighted.)

It was a good day.

Incidentally, our daughter said a woman in Chico may have had the best sign.  It simply said, “You suck at golf.” 

A letter to Sen. Ted Cruz

Sen. Ted Cruz

167 Russell Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C.  20510

Dear Senator Cruz:

Today I heard on the news that you said the “No Kings” demonstration, which I will be joining, was sponsored by George Soros.  

You are either very uninformed, or you are trying to gin up hatred against Americans concerned about an unchecked president and a Congress that is not doing its constitutional duty to reign in an executive branch that has gone off the rails.

I do not think you are uninformed.

The Senate has a long and proud history.  At one time it was even called “the greatest deliberative body in the world.”  You, sir, sully that institution.  Start acting like a U.S. Senator and not some internet troll.

Sincerely,

Roy Christman

"Vote Yes on Retention" signs

Today we drove to State College to pick up one hundred “Vote Yes on Retention” yard signs.  I’ve already started putting them in people’s yards.  Since I firmly believe the politics should not be all sturm and drang, we stopped a nice lunch in a pub on the way home.  

The Centre County Democrats have a beautiful headquarters, fully staffed, full of signs and buttons and phones.  In addition to the Retention signs, they threw in three “Chaos, Cruelty, and Higher Costs:  Are We Great Yet” signs.

I now have something to take to the rally on Saturday.

(It was nice to see Old Main on the Penn State campus.  I think the No Kings rally will be held in front of the building.  The last rally I went to there was in 1968, and, if I remember correctly, it was about Vietnam.)

Sign for No Kings 2

Our “No Kings” rally will be in Lehighton on Saturday from 12 to 1 p.m.  It will be along the Stanley Hoffman Boulevard, often called by locals “the bypass.”  I have not decided what poster to make.  I was thinking about “King George III had less power than President Trump.”  That is a true statement.  King George III had to get Parliament’s approval to wage war and to raise taxes.  Still, that seemed too academic.  Half the people won’t know who King George was.

Now I’m thinking:  James Madison warned:  “A standing military force with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”  

It’s a bit wordy, I’ll grant you, but I like quoting James Madison.  And if any MAGA followers are reading this, James Madison was one of the men who wrote the Constitution.  He also served as our fourth president.

An offer from Eric Trump

 OK, who is the wise guy who put me on this list?  Today I got a letter from Eric Trump.  He’s the one who used cocaine, right?  Anyway I will quote part of the letter for your amusement.

     I want to offer you a complimentary copy of my new book, Under Siege.

     It’s a story that began on June 16, 2015–when my dad made the courageous decision to forego a very comfortable life to serve the good men and women of the United States of America.

...and put my family directly in the crosshairs of everything the Radical Left could throw at us.

They accused us...

Indicted us...

Debanked us...[sic]

Weaponized the Department of Justice against us...[oh, the irony]

Censored us...

Raided our houses...

Tried to kill my dad–TWICE...

Killed a friend near and dear to my entire family...

Impeached my father...
...

Yet here we are.

Still fighting...

     It continues like that for four pages with a fifth page for donations.  If you give $50 or more, you get a copy of Eric’s book entitled Under Siege.  If you give $150 or more, he will send you two copies!

Indigenous People's Day

I’ve lived in CA too long.  We were celebrating Indigenous People’s Day when my daughter was in Rockridge Elementary in the Oakland school system.  Why would we celebrate a day dedicated to a guy who “discovered” a continent when people were already here?

I live in a township–Towamensing–that has a name taken from the Lenape

Nation.  Unfortunately, I don’t know any members of that tribe.  They were driven out of the area into western PA, then Ohio, then further west.  That is, those who weren’t killed by European diseases or shot to death.

Today there are three federally-recognized Lenape tribes, none in Pennsylvania. 

Saving American education

My friend David (yes, that David) sent me a link to some information and a petition to sign.  I did it, and you can too.  Here is the link:

Save American Higher Education (video)
https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/save-american-higher-education-video?r=5n73h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

Ozymandias–Taking the long view

What will people think about Trump in a thousand years?  Shelley answered this question already in one of the best poems in the English language.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Congrats to Maria Corina Macha

Congrats to Maria Corina Machad0   

    The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 was won by Maria Corina Machado, an amazingly courageous opposition leader of Venezuela.  She certainly deserves the prize, and I am so pleased that the Prize committee did the right thing.   

                                                                       

Tree huggers win

The Borough of Jim Thorpe received an “offer” from a company to buy timber from a 600+ parcel of woodland the Borough owns.  The trees would have been mature oaks and other hardwoods.  The company said the cutting would be selective and would help to prevent forest fires.

The environmental group Save Carbon County (I’m a member) showed up in force at the Jim Thorpe meeting with knowledgeable people who actually knew something about forestry.  It was pointed out that the resulting increase in underbrush in an eastern Pennsylvania forest would actually increase the fuel load, that erosion results from logging, that invasive species grow if no further steps are taken after logging, and that logging trucks can do damage to borough streets.

The Council voted unanimously to end negotiations for company to cut any trees.