Quick attacks on Harris' plan show ruling class fear

Senator Kamala Harris

Well, it certainly looks as though Kamala Harris has made a big impression.

Harris, a first-term senator from California, jumped into the 2020 presidential race with big ideas.

First, higher taxes on incomes of more than $10 million a year.

Second, Medicare for all.

A government-run, single-payer health care system that would eliminate private health insurance.

In other words, a system similar to those of nearly every other western nation.

Super cold weather brings back super cold memories

Sixty below zero?

Sweet Jesus, that's cold. Yes, it's just wind-chill, but the actual temperature Sunday night in International Falls, Minn., was 45 below zero.

But it's often cold there, isn't it?

It certainly is, but Sunday night's low temperature broke the old record by 9 degrees, a record set 53 years ago. And it will only get worse. Temperatures Tuesday night may drop as low as 25 below zero in Chicago for the first time in more than 30 years.

Before we go any further, get it out of your head that this disproves global warming or whatever. What is happening is climate change, and it shows itself with bigger hurricanes, more extreme storms and all sorts of other fun things.

Outer suburbs in Northern Virginia much closer now

There is a picture that keeps coming to mind lately, although I'm not sure why.

It's a person I haven't seen for more than 35 years in a place I haven't been for more than 40 years.

Modern-day Reston, Va.

Reston, Va., didn't look anything like this in February 1975. What is now a town of more than 58,000 was in its early stages as America's first planned community.

My fiancee and I had just moved into a nice new apartment on the north side of Herndon in a community called Stuart Woods.

Greatest irony is Trump as an evangelical hero

Jesus wept.

We have apparently reached a level of stupidity in this country that people's first reactions to tragedies are completely inappropriate. Such as the folks who reacted to the Florida MAGA bomber's arrest by calling it a "false flag" operation designed to embarrass Donald Trump.

And the very next day when Trump himself reacted to the shooter who killed 11 people and wounded six others in a Pittsburgh synagogue by saying they should have had armed guards inside to prevent incidents like this.

Our hapless leader did something most people would have found very difficult to do -- he made the shooting about him and claimed that the bomber and the shooter had hurt the momentum Trump and his fellow Republicans had been building going into the midterm elections.

Jewish leaders and civic officials in Pittsburgh asked Trump not to come to Pennsylvania until after the funerals. In fact, leaders at the synagogue said they didn't want to see Trump until he made a statement renouncing white supremacy.

Of course he came anyway, bringing his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law with him.

Pain in the neck, Trumpo's fear and a little nostalgia

Short takes from a journey through a disorganized mind:

WISH I COULD BE MORE STOIC: I think most of us wish that. No one wants to think of himself as a whiner or someone who is always complaining, so when my wife said -- albeit sympathetically -- that I had been fussing about the lower back pain that keeps me from taking two steps without pain, I challenged her.

I don't complain, I said. I do sometimes cry out involuntarily when a misstep bumps up the pain-o-meter.

That's true, she said.

Bone spurs in my upper spine and my lower spine seem to be kicking my ass all the time. I also have periodic pains in both hands, both feet and one elbow.

I'm not a complainer.

I may, however, be a puss.

***

SPEAKING OF WHINERS: Donald Trump, aka Trumpo or Trumpo!, basically showed his 34-day government shutdown was for naught Friday when he agreed to reopen the government before discussing anything else.

Looks like we're enjoying a heck of a winter

"Now is the winter of our discontent ..."
-- BILL SHAKESPEARE

Boy, isn't it?

Is there anything that could be going wrong right now that isn't? Whether it's Donnie & Mitch shutting down the government or referees cheating the New Orleans Saints out of a Super Bowl visit, or any list of other annoyances, the winter of 2019 is looking like one heck of a bad time.

We're into the second month of the government shutdown, and the two biggest stories out of Washington this week are whether Trump will get to make his State of the Union speech and how embarrassing it was the he bought fast food for the visiting national champion Clemson Tigers.

Is it too late to save newspapers as check or balance?

"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."
-- THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1789

I need to start by saying one thing that will probably annoy a lot of people.

Freedom of the Press is about newspapers and magazines.

So-called broadcast media -- radio and television -- is something else entirely. Just as working people weren't helped when personnel departments became "Human Resources," it didn't do newspapers any good when folks started calling the press the media.

America's 'faithful' need to look at their hearts

Some people shouldn't be allowed in restaurants.

At least in this country, people are expected to understand that a large part of the money wait staff earn comes to them in tips. Whether it's 15 percent, 18 percent or more, without it the people doing the serving are little more than serfs.

Kansas 'Christians' failed to tip.

Lately, though, tipping -- or more accurately, failing to tip -- has become something of a political statement.

In a Wichita restaurant recently, a family of "Christians" left their waiter what appeared to be a generous $20 tip.

He was pleased ... until he realized what they had left him was a religious tract designed to look like money.

My son learned a lesson I wish I had learned in time

My son called from the Southern Hemisphere on Christmas Day. Virgile and his wife Sterling are halfway through their third and final year in Asuncion, Paraguay, where it is early summer.

Sterling and Virgile

He has been in the Foreign Service for 10 years now and in his early 30s, he has either lived or visited every continent except Antarctica (no embassies there) and maybe Africa (I'm not sure).

Virgile is an amazing guy. People say things about him that most of can only dream about hearing about ourselves.

On his first tour, his supervisor wrote in his evaluation that "Virgile is the best young Foreign Service officer I have seen in 20 years."

Eight years earlier, in his first year of college at Cal State Northridge, his roommate told me that "Virgile is the nicest person I have ever met."

Wow.

I can't claim credit for that. Nobody ever called me the best young (or old) anything, and certainly no one ever said I was the nicest person they ever met.

American Dream is more than just what we own

Many people still alive remember the time when the United States of America was known as the "land of the free and the home of the brave."

Some will even remember when the "American Dream" wasn't about getting rich or owning a business, but just doing well enough to have a home and a family and some leisure time to enjoy life.

People pretty much got to choose how much they wanted to succeed. If they were satisfied to work hard enough to support their family and not much more, that was OK. If they wanted to work hard enough to become a big success, they could try that too.

We had yet to become the Consumer Society, where our worth was based on how much we owned and how often we gobbled up the newest televisions, or computers, or cars.

1938

We had yet to learn the glories of consumer debt.

People bought things after saving for them. The idea of "buy now, pay later" came along after World War II, and bank cards -- essentially revolving loans -- were a generation further in the future.

When the troops came home from Europe and the Pacific, and when rationing ended, folks who hadn't been able to buy anything for four years all of a sudden splurged.

And all of a sudden we were off to the races, acquiring possessions at nosebleed speed and not even really asking ourselves whether each new thing we owned was actually making our lives better.

When my parents were first married, they were on a tight budget. Each payday, they cashed their checks and put money into envelopes for each of the bills they had to pay.

The first envelope was always savings. Whether it was $5 or only $2, they always saved something.

We got dumb when we stopped reading books

Sometimes it amazes me how much professional pundits try desperately to avoid the truth.

I was reading an article in the Washington Post by Mitchell Lerner, a professor at Ohio State claiming that the end of the Cold War was a major contributor to the ultimate election of Donald Trump.

 Lerner said Americans put aside their hatred of the federal government because of the need to battle the Russians in the Cold War. Once it ended, Americans no longer had use for the federal government.

That's a nice conservative point of view.

Of course it's wrong.

The right wing has spent more than 50 years attacking the government, defending the right of states to treat their residents badly.

We're one of the only countries in which you have fewer rights and/or privileges if you live in, say, Mississippi instead of New York.

The great irony of it all is that it's the people in those states who are conned into believing that they might be poor and ignorant, but they have more freedom than other Americans.

Lives of quiet desperation give us our Trumps

Anne Frank

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. ... I think peace and tranquility will return again."
-- Closing paragraph, "The Diary of A Young Girl,"Anne Frank

So where do we go from here?

I remain basically an optimist about the good hearts of most people, and I was definitely taken aback -- and seriously flattered -- by a reader's comment about me being the "last best hope for a permanent MIDDLE viewpoint."

And anyone who doesn't believe in the basic goodness of people -- especially in view of the fact that a young girl hiding from the Nazis can feel that way -- is either seriously afraid or a serious misanthrope.

I even believe that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had basically good hearts, although I'm not at all sure about Dick Cheney.

That's a joke, folks, although I remain flabbergasted at the idea that someone could shoot an old man in the face and then make him apologize for getting in the way.

But what do you say to someone if they're shot or killed by some lunatic who believes the Jews or the Blacks are out to get him? Too bad? Tough luck? You should have ducked?

What do you do when you encounter hate like that?

In the fall of 1989, I was covering a 49ers football game for my employer at the time, the Reno Gazette-Journal. After I filed my story, I walked to the Candlestick Park parking lot to find that someone had smashed the passenger window in my car.

Since I faced a 220-mile drive across the Sierras to get back to Reno -- in December, at night -- I was also faced with basically freezing.

When I got into the mountains, I couldn't take the cold any longer. I pulled off I-80 and went into a convenience store to buy a pair of cheap gloves and a ski cap. A perfectly nice-looking man, manning the cash register, made conversation with me and asked me why I was buying those particular items.

"Somebody smashed my window and broke into my car at the 49ers game," I said. "I'm freezing."

"Probably your ni**ers," he said. "Your ni**ers will do stuff like that." (If you can't figure it out, the * replaces the letter g)

I knew I wasn't going to convert this individual to tolerance, and I was getting tired, so I just thanked him, got my change and went back to my car.

If I had been younger, if I hadn't been a tired 39-year-old who had seen too much, I probably would have criticized his racist remarks. But except for the racism -- and I know that's an "except for that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln" remark -- he didn't seem like a bad guy.

He didn't say what he said in an angry voice. He was more old and ignorant than anything else, and I'm not convinced we should hate people for being old or ignorant.

All that happened a long, long time ago. And so much has happened to make it more difficult to stand against hate. We have a president who rode a platform of hate and anger to the White House. Whether he won fairly or was installed by the Russians doesn't much matter after nearly two years. We have to deal with the fact that he's there and at least for now has a great deal of power.

Bad year for health & friends, but a great family

A new year?

Boy, did we need one.

Queen Elizabeth II once referred to a year late in the last century as an annus horribilis, and except for the fact that I'd probably get snarky about the first word, I might be tempted to describe 2018 with that same phrase.

I have two very close friends I have known forever. One lost his wife on Thanksgiving Day, the other lost his mother on Christmas Day. That one had been chronically ill for years and the other was 88 years old may have made it less surprising, but that's about all.

My own mother is slipping away. She'll be 92 next month, and she has outlived her husband of 52 years -- my dad -- by more than a decade. I have nine siblings, five of them brothers and sisters in-law, one one of them learned recently of an advanced case of liver cancer.

Albanie

I don't remember who it was who said it first, but we all reach a point in our lives when life begins taking away more than it gives us. The "gifts" it has been giving me in recent times are chronic arthritis pain in my neck and upper spine, stenosis somewhere in that same area that has me almost blacking out at times, and worsening pain in my left hip that has me worrying I'll need a hip replacement.

Oh, and assuming I live another 344 days, I'll "celebrate" my 70th birthday in December.

Seventy.

Damn.