This has been a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and pop culture using the Google Blogger platform with the address halbrown.org. As of Oct. 10, 2023 it has been renamed Hal Brown's Stressline and moved to the WordPress platform with the new address Stressline.org - Posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky.
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 bothKid 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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
"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."
