Another letter to Sen. Dave McCormick

Dear Sen. McCormick:

Thank you for sending me the statement you made to President Trump at his latest Pennsylvania rally.  Fawning over the President not a good look for you.  

Trying to ingratiate yourself to a goofball who is about to involve us in a war with Venezuela, deserts our allies, wrecks the economy, tears down a portion of the White House to build a ballroom, takes away protection for 85% of our wetlands, says global warming is a hoax, deports children, calls women reporters piggies....  I’ll stop there, but I think you catch my drift.  You are trying way too hard to be the teacher’s pet, and it is pathetic.

I know you have five years left on your term, but I don’t think voters will forget.  And Pennsylvania voters are not as stupid as you may think.  The judicial elections in November were a reminder.

Sincerely,

     Roy Christman

Tonight's awards go to...

Indiana, where Republican legislators refused to bow to Administration threats and voted against  gerrymandering their congressional district lines to elect more Republicans.  There are members of the Republican Party who still uphold American values, and they deserve our thanks.

Bulgarian citizens,  who turned out by the millions in Sofia to protest their government earlier this week.  The Prime Minister resigned after the protest.  The demonstrators surpassed the 3.5% mark, and it worked.

 

The Declaration of War on Venezuela

It’s a really busy season.  Presents to buy and wrap, holiday cards to send, parties to attend, notes to write–the list goes on.  Somehow during all this activity, I missed the news about Congress declaring war on Venezuela.  I don’t know what the vote was, or the rational for the Declaration of War, or what the strategy will be.  Will the draft be re-instated?  Do we have allies in this war?  Will we use atomic weapons?

I need to pay more attention.

Seizing the means of communication

One of the first acts of authoritarians is to seize control of the news media.  It is difficult for the populace to know what is occurring if the only sources of news are controlled by the government.  We’ve already seen Zuckerberg bend to Trump’s desires.  The Murdock family is complicit.  Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post are bent, the L.A. Times is bent, Trump has “Truth Social,” X is full of misleading racist crap.  And now CNN, which has already compromised with Trump in various ways, is about to be sold to Trump’s lapdogs who will do his bidding. 

I keep thinking I’ll be approached with an offer from the Trump family to change the tone of this blog.  Would I do it?  Depends on how much they offer.

Learning new things from the Trump administration

One of the most interesting things about the Trump administration is learning all kinds of things I never knew.  Here is just one small example.  Today I learned that the Environmental Protection Agency has discovered that human activity does not cause climate change.

I did know that Trump was pushing oil and gas and coal.  What I did not realize until today was that none of that has anything to do with climate change, which is evidently a hoax.  

I also found out that the E.P.A. under Administrator Lee Zeldin is about to rule that climate change does not threaten human health.  Evidently that is only the belief of what an E.P.A. spokeswoman called a “climate cult.”

Also, did you know that vaccines cause autism?  And this is the greatest economy ever.  

I didn’t know any of this.

Mary Antin's first day of school

A mailer arrived today from the Heritage Foundation.  It included a vicious “poll” asking about criminal immigrants and hyping mass deportations.  Along with that was a warning that harboring an “illegal” immigrant was a violation of federal law.  

My heritage does not resemble that of the Heritage Foundation.  Mine goes back to Roger Williams and William Penn and the Declaration of Independence and Henry David Thoreau and even Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett.  “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.”  I think I remembered that correctly.

These Heritage Foundation people are the same people who would turn in Anne Frank.  Their heritage is that of the Nazis, the Quislings, the Ku Klux Klan, the slave catchers.

Here is an antidote for you from Promised Land by Mary Antin about her first day at school.  It’s an America to fight for:

     Father himself conducted us to school.  He would not have delegated that mission to the President of the United States.  He had awaited the day with impatience equal to mine.  He took long strides in his eagerness, the rest of us running and hopping to keep up.

     At last the four of us stood around the teacher’s desk; and my father, in his impossible English gave us over to  her charge, with some broken word of his hopes for us that his swelling heart could no longer contain....  I think Miss Nixon guessed what my father’s best English could not convey.  I think she divined that by the simple act of delivering our school certificates to her he took possession of America.

Nurses are no longer a profession

Well, at least according to the Trump administration.  The “Big Beautiful Bill” evidently has a list of occupations that are no longer consider “professions.”  According to a list from Newsweek, non-professions include:

nursing

physician assistants

physical therapists

audiologists

architects

accountants

educators

social workers.

Why?

The American Work Ethic

What ever happened to the American work ethic?  Seriously, which of the following are doing their jobs in a meaningful and responsible way?

The U.S. Supreme Court

the President

The Senate Majority leader

The Speaker of the House

The Senate as a whole

The House of Representatives

the Washington Post

Fox News

The Department of Defense 

The FBI

The CDC

The State Department

The Department of Homeland Security

CNN

There are some bright spots.  The lower courts.  The New York Times.  Harvard University.  The American Civil Liberties Union.  The New Yorker.  

Not nearly enough.   

Charles Norman Shay, 1924-2025

Mr. Shay was a 19-year-old medic on D-Day at the landing on Omaha Beach.  He won the Silver Star for his efforts to save wounded men in the water by turning them over, grabbing them under their shoulders, and dragging them through the waves up to the beach.  He served with the troops at the battle of Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge.  He was captured by the Germans and liberated in April 1945.

Mr. Shay was a member of the Penobscot Tribe in Maine.  When he tried to vote in 1945, wearing  his uniform with the Silver Star, he was turned away.  Maine did not allow Indians to vote in federal elections until 1954 and state and local elections until 1967.

Until 1967.

I’d like to think that the days of discrimination against Indians are over, but last night I saw an interview with an Indian woman was in the cast of the recent streaming drama entitled “Dark Winds.”  She showed the I.C.E. agents her tribal I.D. card, but the agents said that didn’t count. She was arrested.  Where the fuck are you going to deport an American Indian to?  

Mr. Shay moved to northwestern France not far from Omaha Beach in 2018 and lived there until his death.  Wise move.  

If you want to read the full obit of Mr. Shay, you can find it in today’s New York Times.

West Bank colony

 I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on the efforts by the United Nations to bring an end to colonialism.  Angola and Mozambique, Namibia, and Zimbabwe were still colonies when I completed it, but it was fairly obvious that colonialism was on the way out.  After the Portuguese colonies and what was then South West African and Rhodesia gained independence, the only colonies left would be remnants like Puerto Rico and some small islands.   

Now Israel has approved 22 settlements in the West Bank on territory owned by Palestinians.  The Palestinians did not give up this land willingly, but they had no choice.  A process that I thought was basically over in 1973 when I completed the thesis has come roaring back.  And it has come back because of Israel. 

In the past I considered myself a supporter and friend of Israel.  No more.  

See Natan Odenheimer and Fatima Abdulkarim, “Expansion in West Bank Adds to Displacement,”  New York Times, (5 Dec. 2025), p. A9.

Eating Lemurs in Madagascar

Lemurs are primates with big eyes and long and soft tails.  They are also in decline and are considered endangered.  Why?  Because people in urban areas in Madagascar consider their meat a delicacy that promotes health.

37 percent of shark and ray species are also threatened with extinction.  Why?  Because people kill them for their fins, their meat, and their liver oil.

You know what?  I don’t care if people in Ohio really do eat the cats and the dogs.  We have too damn many cats and dogs in any case.  If you want to get concerned, get concerned about people eating octopuses and shark fin soup.  Quit eating veal with its pens to keep calves from exercising.  Quit eating pigs that are slaughtered by bleeding them to death.  Quit eating eggs from caged chickens that never get to walk around.  Quit eating beef fed antibiotics on feedlots.  

I am not a vegetarian, although I am moving in that direction.  If you do eat meat, buy your meat from local butchers who raise their own animals.  Know what you eat.  

Deported on the way to Thanksgiving with her parents

A 19-year-old college student, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, was headed home from Massachusetts to Texas for Thanksgiving with her parents.  She was brought here from Honduras when she was seven.  Her father’s employer had arranged for her flight so she could surprise him at work.

There was a court order that she could not be removed from the U.S. while her case was pending.  She was arrested at the Logan Airport in Boston, detained in Texas, and  “...put on a bus with shackles on her wrists, waist and ankles before being put on a flight to Honduras.”

She had been studying business at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.  She is now in Honduras with grandparents.

We have become evil, led by an evil man and abetted by evil underlings.

Information for this post, including the quotation, is from Amada Holpuch and Annie Correal, “A College Student Tried to Go Home to Texas for Thanksgiving.  She Was Deported,” New York Times, (2 Dec. 2025), p. A17. 

Where was Gen Z?

In an article in the Opinion section of the Sunday New York Times, Brendan Nyhan bemoaned the absence of young people at the latest  “No Kings” rally.  He thought maybe it was because meaningful change seemed so unlikely to young Americans.

Both of the rallies I attended in Carbon County had a wide mixture of age groups, from people in their teens and twenties to people who were what I would consider elderly.  

I’ve been to rallies in the Sixties and Seventies where almost everybody was under thirty.  I’ve been to anti-pipeline rallies where almost everyone was over 50.  The No Kings rallies, by contrast, contained a broad cross-section of Carbon County residents.  We even had a guy in a MAGA hat.  Great turnout.

Admiration for Francisco Franco?

 Generalisimo Francisco Franco, an ally of Hitler and Mussolini, came to power in 1939 after a bloody civil war.  He then ruled Spain for 36 years, killing and imprisoning his enemies, retarding Spanish economic progress, mistreating Spanish colonies in Africa, and ruling Spain with an iron fist.  He died in 1975, 50 years ago.

I was in Spain in 1979, four years after his death.  It was an exciting time.  The bookstores were selling books by Marxists and Socialists And Feminists.  I stopped in at a local Socialist Party headquarters and got a huge poster, which I still have.  Spain was free and democratic, the country was vibrant, and people were happy.

Now I read that many young men in Spain admire Franco and long for the type of tyrannical leadership he provided.  I think this must be some mental aberration on the part of young men.  The same thing seems to be happening in the U.S. where young men like tech bros and Proud Boys and followers of Charlie Kirk think it is manly to be racist and “tough.”  

Get a grip, guys.  You are not “masculine.”  You are like sad little boys trying really really hard to be grown up men.