November 22, 2022

Would it be that "America the Beautiful" was really America the beautiful

Would it be that "America the Beautiful" was really America the beautiful

by Hal Brown

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All the photos below are mine. Click to enlarge them.

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I looked with dismay at a map of 2022 House election results in a HuffPost article which had an interactive red/blue map.  The article was featured as the main story on their website:


It was the map not so much the expected loss of all but two members of the House losing their runs for reelection that got to me.

I live in western Oregon which is a Democratic area that occasionally elects Republican candidates but is mostly blue. 

My partner and I enjoy exploring the lovely countryside around where we live in a Portland suburb. 



From the rolling hills of Oregon's wine country (above) to the small towns with unique restaurants like The Scream'n Chicken in Gaston...

... to the Washington side of the mighty Columbia River we find both beauty and reminders that in some ways we are in alien territory. I took these photos on Washington's Rt. 14 along the Columbia River:

Below: These are in the town of Aurora which is known for its antique stores all in historic homes. We often eat at The Old Colony Pub there. These are two houses in Aurora which are across the street from each other.

We sometime find ourselves in hard-core MAGA areas. Once in a small town we ate in a restaurant where we could overhear a group of men debating which kinds of guns they preferred. 



In our own district five the highly qualified liberal Democrat t Jamie McLeod-Skinner lost a tight race to Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Thankfully Democrat Tina Kotek won a squeaker beating far-right candidate Christine Drazen and would-be spoiler independent Betsy Johnson for governor. This is a result of all the right-wing voters residing not only in the very rural parts of the state but also in some of our suburban areas.

Back to the national map...

Looking at it filled me with sadness. So much red and so little blue.  I live in western Oregon, clearly a Democratic area. 

Population centers around the country are blue but many beautiful scenic rural areas vote 60/40 GOP  

The verses of America the Beautiful came to mind. It is a song I think would be a better national anthem than a song about a War of 1812 battle and the US flag.  

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea! 

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.

America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life.

America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine.

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea. 

An anonymous blogger in a 2010 post said it as well as I could

Excerpts:


This is no new movement.  Although not the National Anthem, America The Beautiful is just as widely recognized by Americans, and has been called the most beloved of all American patriotic songs.   Quoting Lynn Sherr, ABC News correspondent and author of the book America the Beautiful: The Stirring True Story Behind Our Nation’s Favorite Song says this,  “I think it’s simple, I think it’s emotional, and I think it talks about a country, a land and its people — not just about a flag, not just about a battle.  It doesn’t talk about conquest. It talks about the possibilities of this nation.”

America The Beautiful was written in 1893 by Katharine Lee Bates – a thirty-three year old English professor from Wellesley College – as she traveled by train across our great nation.   Her inspiration was her awe for what she witnessed, very much like Francis Scott Key almost a century before.

Perhaps the preference comes down to whether you’re a “spacious skies” or a “bombs bursting in air” kind of person.

I'm a spacious skies kind of person. I wish more Americans were.




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November 21, 2022

Poltico reminds us of "Things Donald Trump Did as President You Might Have Missed"


Poltico reminds us of "Things Donald Trump Did as President You Might Have Missed

By Hal Brown

I don't have much time to write this morning because I have to leave in an hour to head to the dermatologist for mohs surgery on the tip of my nose. This will be my third such surgery on my face but the others didn't worry me but this one does because of the location. Worry wart that I am I wonder how much of the lesion, and thus of my nose, will be needed to be removed and if I'll need a skin graft. 

I wonder if I'll end up looking like the Lee Marvin character in Cat Balou where he played both Kid Shelleen and Tim Strawn his villainous twin with the metal nose.

Update: My nose is still intact. The entire procedure took two hours as the first sample got all the squamous cancer cells.



Now to my subject. 

You hear Republicans being asked in the media about their opinions of Trump and while many of them lament his style they often praise his policies.

I wondered just what he and his administration actually did while they were in office. A simple web search came up with the Politico article from 2021:

30 Things Donald Trump Did as President You Might Have Missed

Trump’s presidency may be best remembered for its cataclysmic end. But his four years as president also changed real American policy in lasting ways, just more quietly. We asked POLITICO’s best-in-class policy reporters to recap some of the ways Trump changed the country while in office, for better or worse.



I don't have time to read it carefully but thought it was worth sharing. What jumped out at me was that among the anti-democratic and inhumane policies he foisted upon us there were some good things. The good things often happened inadvertently. 

There's an old saying that even Mussolini made the trains run on time though many elements of this have been debunked.



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November 20, 2022

I woke to the nightclub shooting on TV: Thoughts about the MAGA demonization of being woke

I woke to the nightclub shooting on TV: Thoughts about the MAGA demonization of being woke

By Hal Brown

I try to write something every morning but may not post something until later if I post at all today. I have to leave soon to go for mohs surgery on the tip of my nose.



This is how Mirriam-Websters defines being woke:

Woke is now defined in this dictionary as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice),” and identified as U.S. slang. It originated in African American English and gained more widespread use beginning in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. By the end of that same decade it was also being applied by some as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning.


By chance they used the image of the clock above. I literally woke to this news as I turned on my bedroom TV. I thought about the new meaning of woke.

I thought about how MAGA politicians campaign against "woke" and how it suits them to play into the hate fueled prejudices of bigots. They can use anti-LGBT code words and dog whistles but Republican governors with Republican legislatures can actually pass laws.

If you are the presumptive alternative to Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination everything you say or do will gain national media attention.

More than any other politician, and this includes Trump, Ron DeSantis epitomizes the anti-woke movement. Consider this HUFFPOST story:

This is from June, 2022:

After spending the last year attacking LGBTQ people, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) claimed that the state “will not tolerate hatred towards the LGBTQ” community “of any kind” as part of his proclamation on the anniversary of the Pulse shooting.

On June 12, 2016, 49 people were killed and 53 people were injured when a gunman opened fire on the LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando. June 12 has remained Pulse Remembrance Day in the state. DeSantis ordered flags in the state to be flown at half-mast.

From the LGBTQ Nation story:



DeSantis is the ultimate hypocrite. He happily signed the "Don't Say Gay Law" while saying that “the state of Florida will not tolerate hatred towards the LGBTQ and Hispanic community of any kind, and together we stand united against terrorism and hate of any kind."

This is how DeSantis described his lopsided victory over Charlie Crist in his gerrymandered state:

“We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

If the Colorado Springs shooting happened in Florida like the Pulse Nightclub shooting, I wonder how DeSantis would have been parsing his words in order to condemn it while sending the message to his anti-LGBT supporters that he didn't mean what he was saying.

I suppose he could dust off what he said after the Pulse Nightclub shootings and order flags to be flown at half-staff.

It is a shame worth crying over that the notion that "woke" has been applied to the political left because I'd like to believe that there are many people who consider themselves to be non-MAGA Republicans who believe in the percepts of being woke.

Feeling people are proud to be woke.

Update:

This was on Fox News:

Fox News expert links gay club shooting to 'elementary school' in wake of GOP 'anti-woke' laws


Excerpt:

"How do we tamp down hate crimes across the board?" Neville wondered. 

"I think it begins in our schools, our educational system," Rogers explained. "We have to do a lot of educating in elementary school with regard to, yeah, people may be different in your eyes but they're people, they're American citizens and they deserve to have the constitutional protections that all of us have."

"So, it begins at the elementary school level and we have to make sure that it continues throughout our entire lives," he added. "We need to stop the hateful rhetoric on the internet, by our politicians, by everyone! And we need to bring the temperature down and understand that, you know, we're all God's children and we have to respect each other."

And then there's her expression of feigned sympathy:





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November 19, 2022

Can the media ignore the nude nuttiness of the House GOP and Trump?

 Can the media ignore the nude nuttiness of the House GOP and Trump?

By Hal Brown

I was prompted to make the image above after reading this featured article on the MSNBC website by Noah Rothman:

It may be asking too much of the American media ecosystem that it approach this abnormal candidacy with dispassion. Trump himself makes that task all but impossible. But answering Trump’s heat with more heat has so far had the opposite of its intended effect. Perhaps it’s time to give coldness a try.


While Rothman writes about media coverage of Trump his points also apply to how much the media is going to cover the antics of the House MAGA Republicans who all aspire to be demigods devoted to Trump. They are slavering to  mount investigations into Beelzebub Biden.

Ancient artists weren't shy about depicting demons and their victims in the nude.
I wrote about the House slavering like rabid dogs to investigate Hunter Biden yesterday...

It will be interesting to see if the GOP decides to use nude photos of Hunter Biden to make their case that he was a dupe of Russian spies trying to steal his laptops, or something equally nonsensical.
We know they have a list of Democrat Demons.

We can expect that Trump will present an irresistible media coverage car wreck, you don't want to look but somehow it is difficult not to when you drive by.

 If Trump is a single car wreck between the Jim Jordans and Marjorie Taylor Greenes it will be the political pile-up to end all political pile-ups.

I think it is not a question of whether or not the media will cover these things. They will. It is how they will frame their reports. Even Fox News may have trouble making Trump, Jordan, Taylor Greene, and the clown crew look rationale and reasonable, let alone likable. 

Below: Best viewed on a high definition large screen TV:

Click above to enlarge.

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November 18, 2022

How the Hunter Biden probe can backside fire on the GOP


In this clip from Fox and Friend's Joe Concha in an Aug. 2021 show asks what if this story involved Donald Trump, Jr. without noting that the junior Trump was very active in the Trump campaign and an official of The Trump Organization.


While the they say they won't show images of a nude Hunter Biden they do include them online:


The Republicans are downright drooling over their plan to investigate Hunter Biden and try to tie him to then vice president Joe Biden and make the case that the vice president somehow colluded with his son in what amounted to treason against the United States.

The fly in this ointment is that all this all comes down to is that like with Benghazi there's no there there.

The more one looks at Hunter Biden's past behavior the more an objective observer with a modicum of empathy who is not blinded by a zealous quest to hurt President Biden the more they will feel sorry for the president.

The saying I am not my brothers keeper, shades of Billy Carter, can be reworded to say I am not my son's keeper.

Joe Biden lost his son Beau to brain cancer in 2015 when he was only 45. Most people don't know that Biden had a daughter with his first wife Neila. Their daughter Naomi passed away in 1972 after being involved in a car crash with their sons Beau and Hunter critically injured. 

To say Hunter had a troubled past fraught with bad decisions and a cavalier disregard for how they might hurt his father personally and politically is an understatement.

Currently there are no plans to call President Biden to testify but I think Hunter will be called. If I had a say in the matter I would make sure he testified without an attorney and answered all the questions candidly. The committee has no power to indict him if he admits to breaking the law, only the Department of Justice can do that. As the New York Times notes, "the Justice Department inquiry into the business dealings of the president’s son has remained active, with a grand jury seeking information about payments from around the world."

Hopefully he will come across as a sympathetic figure, especially compared to his GOP interrogators some of whom are likely to try to intimidate and badger him in their attempts to score points with their MAGA base.

I'd say to the rabid GOP MAGA representatives slavering to get to President Biden through his son "bring it on" because when it comes to a there being there all they have is a president unlucky enough to have a very troubled son. 

And then there this news:

It is a well timed shot across the bow of MAGA House zealots thinking they will have clear sailing as they go full-speed in trying to blow up President Biden though their investigations. This comes as the GOP is orgiastic over their being able to shot down the January 6th Committee.








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