How Does Trump Screw Us? Let Me Count The Ways

That wasn't the original title, but as I started writing, it just seemed more apt.  

This post is about two videos - one by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut who lays out the details of the unprecedented level of corruption in the first six weeks of the Trump administration.    (Thus the title of this post.)  

The second is a woman from Oklahoma venting her anger over the botched Signal chat that put her husband (stationed in the Middle East) in potential danger.  

I was struck by the contrast between these two approaches to criticizing the Trump administration - one highly factual and rational, almost like a college lecture.  The other focused, but almost unhinged in the level of anger and invective.  

I'd argue that we should all be at the level of anger and resistance that woman is at.  We shouldn't wait until we are directly impacted.  100,000 people raging like she does would probably pry enough US Senators away from Trump to stop the venal actions that Senator Murphy describes in detail.  

We need the facts and details to understand how we're being screwed to raise our level of anger and resistance.  And we need her passion and fury to get us to stop pretending life will not be completely disrupted if we don't stop this horror right now.  

Murphy Video

There's a lot of content and detail here.  You can skip down to the video, or you can first look at my outline of the ways Murphy lists that Trump is corrupting government and enriching himself and his oligarch supporters - from streamlining the art of the bribe to dismantling agencies that have investigations that hurt Trump supporters.  Here are some of them, to help you keep track.  I've added links if you want to find out more about each.  

1.  Memecoins - He starts out talking about Trump meme coins that can be used to transfer money, unreported, directly into Trump's account.  This is the latest in bribe technology. 

What are Meme Coins?

I had to look up meme coins to try to understand what they are.  Here's a link to investopedia.com and one to wikipedia to help you understand.  The first link even offers ways to invest.  The Wikipedia link is more contextual and historical.  One thing I learned looking this up is that DOGE - the Department Of Government Efficiency - the rogue mob that Elon Musk is leading, is also the name of one of the more popular memecoins, one that Musk promoted.

2. Pays off Oil/Gas Industry's $1 billion bribe.   On day one Trump privileges oil and gas and hurts their competition- wind, solar etc.  This article documents the billion dollar ask, but the actual money count doesn't get that high.  But the benefits were given.  

3.  Jan 25  Fires the watch dogs - all the Inspectors General - the people who investigate corruption

4.  Jan 27 - Fires head of National Labor Relations Board.  This means NLRB cannot investigate cases.  Musk has lots of cases before the NLRB.  And many others around Trump have cases pending.

5.  Jan 30 - awards $800K stock of Trump Media platform  to  cabinet members, which Murphy says is another way for people to move cash to bank accounts of cabinet members in order to get favors.  

6.  Feb 23 - Weaponization of DOJ  - Drops case against Musk SpaceX    Then drops case against a GOP congressman.  Then Operation Whirlwind that targets anyone critical of Musk or DOGE.   DOJ turned into entity that drops cases of Trump loyalists and attacks those who criticize Trump.

7.  Feb 1  - Shut down Consumer Finance Protection Board  which was investigating Musk and Trump backers - consumer protection actions now gone

8.  Feb 4.  Meetings in White House with Business Partners - Saudi Gulf League and PGA - Saudis play torunaments at Trump golf course 

9.  Feb 6 - Pam Bondi - dulls foreign government agent act - No longer registering as foreign government represenatives  = now his friends can lobby government while secretly getting paid by foreign governments.  

10.  Feb 10 - Eric Adams case dropped and publicly announced that gettting rid of the charges against Adams if he pledges loyalty to Trump.Six  people in DOJ refused and resigned and finally the seventh agreed.  

11.  Buying $400 million Tesla’s.  Biden admin was going to buy $483K, Trump bumps it up to $400 million.  This seems to have been scuttled.

This is only a partial list.  The rest are in the video.  

 The Murphy Video

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The second video is just sheer anger at Trump's inept appointees jeopardizing the life of the lady's husband as well as of those of his fellow Middle East stationed military men.  [This is supposed to end after about 4 minutes 30 seconds - I added instructions into the code.  But it didn't work.  I'm not recommending you watch the whole thing.]

The original video I saw, but couldn't find a way to embed, was sharply directed to Sen. Lankford of Oklahoma.  She vows to end his career.  Very powerful messaging.  You can see it at this link to a Bluesky post.

As I said above, we should all be at the level of anger and resistance that woman is at.  We shouldn't wait until we are directly impacted.  Murphy offers us just a few of the reasons we should be angry as hell.   100,000 people raging like the woman in the video does would probably cause enough GOP Senators and Members of Congress away from Trump to stop the horrors that Senator Murphy describes in detail.  

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806 – 1861

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

This poem is in the public domain.

It's Time To Catch Up Here - From No-Snow, Yes-Snow, Trees, Basketball, DEI etc.

There are lots of reasons I haven't blogged for a while.  There's so much nonsense flooding social media, I'd like to not add to it.  But there are also terrible things happening that are begging for push back.  But if I blog about them, I want to offer a different perspective than what everyone else is saying, and I haven't been very confident I could.  

But also, we've returned to Anchorage.  Aside from finding Anchorage strangely snow free in early/mid March, there was also a spruce leaning on another tree in the back yard.  (There had been strong winds while we were gone.) I did get a couple of bike rides in on snow free sidewalks/biketrails.  

We've got a tree cutting proposal, but they said the current priority is getting down Christmas lights that are still up.  I think the tree is firmly lodged into the other tree.  Someone - the phone people?  electric people? - cut off the top of the tree which must have looked threatening to the wires along the alley in back.  

But then, finally, the snow came.  

We've been sorting through mail, and just catching up.  I brought the rose bushes in from the garage.   They've already started leafing out.                                                                                      Brought the begonia basket in too.  They began to poke out of the soil in a few days.  

Our internet has been on and off, more off than on.  This morning it was off again but while I was calling Alaska Communications (ACS), I noticed there was a truck up in the alley and a guy on a cherry picker working near the pole.  The ACS tech guy on the phone said they had decided there was a short and the guy at the pole was splicing something.  It still didn't work when he left.  

I went off to school.  The particular kid I'm focused on was out for the third day this week.  He was there Tuesday and it was nice to see each other after our long break.  Our regular routine is:

Steve:  "Good morning, A... how are you today?"

He's supposed to, and generally does, answer, "I'm fine thank you.  And you?"  The daily repetition is intended to get him comfortable speaking in English and it's been working.  But Tuesday he had trouble answering.  I finally figured it out.  It wasn't that he'd forgotten while I was gone.  It was just that he wasn't 'fine, thank you' and he didn't know how to say, 'I'm not feeling well.'

And he hasn't been there since Tuesday.  But that gives me a chance to help out other kids in the class.  I discovered today that two kids couldn't tell me what 2X8 equals off the top of their heads.  Working on ways to help them learn the multiplication of basic numbers from one to ten.  

And while the Trump administration is trying to erase all pictures and mentions of non-white males in US history (see War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon’s DEI purge)  the elementary school I'm volunteering in has very recently put up four large murals that feature men and women of note, representing various ethnicities.  

Part of me doesn't really want to bring any unwanted attention to this addition.  This had to have been arranged before Trump's White Nationalist staffers began their crusade to erase non-white, non-males from our history.  The fact that they are taking images of, and stories about, people like these down at the national level shows that the rhetoric about efficiency and cutting the budget are just smokescreen for getting rid of anything that challenges their white male image of the United States.  It costs more to find and delete these images than to leave them up.  And what kind of person feels compelled to erase images of people who aren't white or aren't male?  In my eyes it shows how scared they are to allow anything that suggests anyone else has played a role in making this nation great.  But it's clear that it is white males who are trying to destroy the greatness of the United States.  (Wow.  I'm just writing this to explain the pictures, but what a good segue into the next picture.) 

Went with a friend to GCI (the other phone/internet company in town) the other day where there was a protest against Rep. Nick Begich for speaking to a private group, closed to the public, because he won't speak to his constituents at a public meeting.  Even though the original sponsoring organizations pulled out - the reasons weren't made clear - there were still about 40 folks out with signs about various issues they'd like to discuss - from Ukraine, to fired federal workers, vets,  and the looming wipe outs at Social Security, Medicaid, and the Department of Education.  

I'd note that former US Senator Ted Stevens died in "a DeHavilland DHC-3T . . . registered to Anchorage-based General Communications Inc., a phone and Internet company" on the way to their private remote lodge near Dillingham.

We also got to watch the state high school championship game between the girls' teams from Fort Yukon and Shaktoovik last Saturday at the sports center at UAA.  (It disturbs me that the state underfunds the university and other state organizations so that they have to beg private companies to pay for such things and then plaster the name of the company on the buildings.  I realize most USians probably don't remember when stadiums were not covered with corporate advertising and companies didn't buy naming rights to buildings all over campus, but I do.  Until the 1970s or so, we weren't confronted with corporate branding everywhere we went.  They did name buildings for individual donors* back then, but not for corporate donors.  But then that gets back to issues like cutting taxes continuously for the wealthy and for corporations since the 1950s so that governments have less money and the public has to go to wealthy individuals and corporations to beg for money for public facilities.  So that's why I'm only calling the building 'sports center.')

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Fort Yukon won in a great game.  Lots of passing and setting up shots.  Though the three point rule tempts people to shoot when they probably shouldn't.  

State Infectious Virus Reports

While my regular posts have been slow in coming lately, I have been posting updates based on the (now) weekly updates to the State's Infections Virus Snapshots.  Those don't show up here among the regular posts, but can be found at the tab up top (under the orange header) titled: Respiratory Virus Cases October 2023    Below the introduction are weekly updates (well, not quite. . . there was a period when they were updating them monthly) with new charts and the numbers for each type of virus.  The State's chart is interactive, but each new chart has updated numbers, the original numbers disappear.  So I capture the the originals and the updates so you can see if and how much the numbers changed from when first put up to a week or two later.  When they were doing it monthly, I could only compare the original and updated numbers for the last week of the month because it was the only weekly set of numbers shown twice.  This is getting way too complicated.  If you have questions leave a comment.  

The charts look like the one below and I add some commentary each week.  

You can also go to the state site to see the interactivity of this chart.  

When I got back from the school today, the internet still wasn't working, and again I called ACS, and again, as I was talking I saw an ACS truck in front of the house.  And 20 minutes after the truck left, I could get email and start writing this post.  

*Individual donors.  Even then, there were tremendous protests that UCLA named the new basketball arena after a wealthy oilman and donor, Edwin Pauley, and not for Coach Johnny Wooden who put UCLA basketball on the map with a string of undefeated seasons and national championships.  Before that, UCLA was scrambling for a court for the basketball team.  They played in the Sports Arena near the Coliseum (next door to the campus of rival USC) when they could get it.  Sometimes at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and even the Venice High School gym.