Year of the Snake: a reptile dysfunction, redux

Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate it. It's the Year of the Snake, according to the Chinese zodiac, though not all countries that observe the holiday follow that zodiac. But since we're on the theme of snakes, I think it's a good time to recycle the song lyrics that I originally wrote and published back in 2016, shortly after the disastrous election that rocketed #NotMyPresident Donald John Trump to undeserved power the first time. I've only changed a few words in order to update it.

As you may know, this was inspired by Trump's abiding obsession with a poem -- actually song lyrics -- about a tender-hearted lady and a nefarious, deadly snake. Trump always loved to read it on the campaign trail, taking pains to ensure that his audience understood that the snake represented immigrants. If you want to sing along, here's a video of Al Wilson performing the snake song.

The Orange Snake*
by Cosmic Connie

On the road to ruin one morning
Down the path along the lake
Some angry voters came upon a huge and leering snake
His skin was orange and glowing and he wore a bright red hat
"Oh my, " the voters cried, "Here’s something new! Let’s vote for that!”
“Vote me in, o angry voters
Vote me in, for heaven’s sake
Vote me in, unhappy citizens,” smirked the snake.

They welcomed him so warmly even as he bared his fangs
They cheered his glowing orangeness and his odd combed-over bangs
They clapped and cheered at every hateful diatribe he spewed
For they believed that under him the realm would be renewed.
“Vote me in, unhappy voters
Vote me in, for heaven’s sake
Vote me in, you angry voters,” grinned the snake

And they did so with malicious glee. “Our hero!” they all cried
"If Kamala had won, our dear Republic would have died!”
They cheered the huge orange reptile till reality intruded:
They saw he’d granted favors but that they were not included.
“Stop your whining, loser voters
Suck it up, for heaven’s sake
I’ve made our country greater,” leered the snake.

“We loved you, " cried the voters
“And you've screwed us so, but why?
You know the things you’re doing might just make our nation die!”
“Oh shut up, stupid losers,” said the reptile with a grin
“You knew damn well just what I was, but voted me back in
You bought my lies, you losers
Every lie, for heaven’s sake

And now I’m here forever,” jeered the snake.
© 2016, 2025 by Connie L. Schmidt

Unfortunately the prediction implied in my lyrics, regarding Trumpcult members becoming disillusioned with their idol, never came to pass during that first disastrous term. In a sane world, they would have awakened en masse back then -- or at least at some time during the four years he was out of office but continued to wreak chaos and incite violence -- and we wouldn't have been where we unfortunately are today. And the final line in my lyrics, regarding the snake being "here forever," would have been moot.

This time around, however, there are signs of a growing possibility that some Trump voters are maybe beginning to experience voters' remorse as they see him and his new, much more powerful, well-funded, and meticulously organized wrecking crew at work destroying America.

At least some Trump voters are expressing shock at what he and his cartel of thugs are doing, for they're seeing that his cruel policies and actions could very well ruin their lives, not just the lives of those they hate and fear.

Take immigration, f'rinstance. Although scads of hateful MAGAs are nearly orgasmic because Trump appears to be keeping his promises and threats to rid the republic of the "illegals" who are "poisoning the blood of our country," there are some Trump supporters who are saying, "Oh, shit."

As God Himself put it in a January 29, 2025 piece about Trump supporters getting deported or fearing that they or loved ones will be, "Leopard, meet face." That of course is a reference to the popular social media meme about people voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces party and then expressing shock that the hungry cats are coming for their own faces.

Then there's the totally illegal funding freeze that Caligula and the Cost Cutters attempted to foist upon the American people, to the potential detriment of millions -- including some of the poorest of the Trumpy poor. Despite a court injunction to delay the freeze, the wrecking crew apparently opted to go full speed ahead with it, but blowback was so fierce that the White House actually pulled back -- for now, anyway.

But don't think that this battle is over. It will very likely rise again in some form -- indeed, the White House claims that their pullback is merely a rescission of the original memo issued on the evening of January 27. Moreover, even that surprise move was enough to cause widespread panic and confusion and chaos, even among republicans. In any case it's all straight from the Project 2025 playbook; indeed, Trump's choice to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Ross Vought, is one of the chief architects of Project 2025. Despite the cabal's cover story about reducing government waste, freezing many billions of dollars in aid and benefits is actually in the service of centralizing power to the president in dangerous new ways.

And let's not forget Trump's outrageous wholesale pardoning/sentence commutation of the violent January 6 offenders who tried to overthrow the government, defaced the nation's Capitol, threatened the lives of lawmakers of both parties, tried to murder the Vice President, and viciously attacked numerous police officers for doing their job. Even the largest cop unions, who for the most part had been reliably Trumpist, were appalled by the pardons.

All of the above are just a few of the atrocities that Mango Mussolini has perpetrated, or tried to perpetrate, in his first week and a half back in office (follow that link for more).

Given all of this, a growing tide of disillusionment with Trump -- even among the more devoted MAGAts -- is not completely beyond the realm of possibility. They may even acknowledge that yes, the horrors were Trump's doing and not that of Biden/Obama/the Democrats et al. And perhaps (oh, we can dream, can't we?) the devotees will finally rebel in numbers large enough to actually help move the country away from disaster.

Unfortunately, if Trump and his thugs have their way, the uprising, should it happen, may very well be too little, too late. The damage will have been done, and much of it may be irreparable. It's too early to say. But make no mistake about it, these guys are hard at work plotting to fix it so that they stay in power indefinitely, transforming the land of the free and the home of the brave into an oligarchic, white Christian nationalist Turd Reich. One particularly devoted Trumpanzee, Representative Andy Ogle of Tennessee, is so serious about it that he has proposed to amend the 22nd Amendment to allow his idol to serve a third term.

"And now I'm here forever," jeered the snake.

* No offense is intended to actual snakes, which serve a useful purpose in nature.

Darkness falls as #NotMyPresident Trump and Nazi Co-president Musk begin their reign

"Hello, darkness my old friend..."

Paul Simon's famous lyrics -- covered here by (appropriately) Disturbed -- have never been more pertinent than they are now.

As of today, January 20, 2025, the coup is complete, as The Racket's Jonathan Katz put it. #NeverWasMy President Donald John Trump, apparently without a hint of irony, took the oath of office. It is of course an oath that he has no intention of keeping, which might explain why, contrary to the cartoon in the graphic above, and in contrast to his former coronation, he didn't actually place his tiny paw on the pair of Bibles offered by his Hamburglar-hatted helpmeet.

Cantaloupe Caligula is not by any stretch of the imagination a godly man, notwithstanding the cynical branding efforts by some of his most power-hungry allies (not to mention his own laughable branding efforts). But it's possible that he harbors sufficient religious superstition to fear that the holy books might burst into flame if he came in contact with them while uttering a bald-faced lie. Or perhaps in a rare moment of public candor he was simply expressing his genuine disdain for God's Word. Or maybe he just resented the fact that his own grift bible wasn't the prop of choice.

In any case, contrary to the desperate hopes and speculations of some, there's no Constitutional requirement that a president put his hand on a Bible or Bibles during the swearing-in ceremony. Which on the one hand (so to speak) is good, because it confirms the essentially secular intent of the founders. But on the other hand, it also means that Trump has now been legitimately empowered to dismantle and reassemble the republic according to his and his broligarchic allies' wishes.

* * * * *

The coup might be complete, but the guest list at today's momentous ceremony was apparently incomplete, most likely to the deep disappointment of the newly crowned Lord of All. From the Katz piece (here's that link again):

Today, Donald Trump took the oath of office inside the Capitol his supporters ransacked four years ago, backed by every living former president and the gazillionaire CEOs of every major U.S. tech platform. But one powerful ally who’d really liked to have been there was not in the crowd. Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, was stuck at home, under arrest and indictment for a raft of alleged offenses, including money laundering and trying to instigate a January 6-style coup attempt of his own¹ . The Brazilian Supreme Court denied a plea to reinstate Bolsonaro’s passport; his wife was expected to attend instead.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, another Trumpy president—Yoon Suk Yeol² —is also in custody and facing trial for his declaration of martial law in what appeared to be yet another failed self-coup. Yoon was, unlike Bolsonaro but like Trump, the sitting president at the time of his attempt. In fact, he is still the president, though his powers have been suspended and he is facing possible removal. In South Korea, trying to overthrow democracy in plain sight is considered a grave enough threat to justify throwing a sitting president in jail. How quaint.

Katz's point, with which I must reluctantly agree, was that President Biden and allies could have done so much more than they did to possibly prevent today's lamentable coronation.

...the simple fact is this: Other countries have found ways to hold their anti-democratic presidents accountable and prevent them from taking office again. America did not.

And because America did not, we have not only Trump in power but also much greater evils, most notably, Co-President Musk, who shamelessly and repeatedly performed a Nazi salute during an afternoon rally today, while thanking Trump supporters for saving civilization. (That tracks; Musk has expressed his support for Germany's far-right (neo-Nazi-adjacent) AFD party.)

And tomorrow the wholesale destruction of America begins in earnest. Actually it has already begun, with a flurry of executive orders intended to further enrich the broligarchs, ruin the environment, and give the shaft to ordinary Americans and marginalized groups such as immigrants and LGBTQ communities. Oh, yes, and Trump is freeing thousands of the J6 convicts who stormed the Capitol in 2021 in an attempt to overturn the government. Nice.

I would say that it's going to be a long four years, but my fear is that we're in for many more years of hell than that.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made...
~ Paul Simon, "The Sound of Silence"

We are all stuck with that garish god, including, unfortunately, the many millions who always saw him for what he truly is and always voted accordingly. But even as grim as things look now, I refuse to give up hope. And it is my hope that you feel the same.

January 6, 2021: NEVER FORGET

 

"The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay."
~ Donald John Trump, January 7, 2021

It's done: Vice President/Should-Have-Been-President-Elect Kamala Harris performed her Constitutionally-defined duties with dignity and grace, certifying the most tragic and disgraceful presidential election in modern American history. And she did it on the fourth anniversary of America's national day of shame, the 2021 Trump-incited Capitol riot/insurrection.

January 6, 2021 was a day of atrocities, and to state otherwise is either idiocy, willful blindness, or gaslighting. Most of us recall that in its immediate wake, J6 was widely acknowledged not only by the news media but also by both political parties for the horror it was. Even Trump himself condemned the Capitol Hill violence the day after it happened, although he did so only after intense pressure, delivering his message in that robotic, completely TelePrompter-dependent style utilized when he's mouthing words he doesn't actually believe, and he completely avoided mentioning his own role in inciting the mob. (Here is a link to his (falsehood-imbued) statement.)

Of course we also know how quickly the J6 Trumpublican narrative changed, with Trump aggressively plowing forward with the Big Lie (which he has never abandoned) and ultimately praising his violent mob as heroes and patriots, and with most republicans of any note falling on the side of J6 whitewash and denialism. As William Kristol and Andrew Egger wrote on The Bulwark today, the shock of what happened four years ago has been replaced by the shock of how that day has become accepted by so many.

...The January 6th truther-in-chief will be our next commander-in-chief. And his administration will be staffed by individuals who range from January 6th apologists to January 6th celebrators.

Meanwhile, the ranks of Trump’s party are full of such people, as is suggested by the fact that the leadership of the Republican House has refused to install a plaque honoring Capitol Police officers for their brave actions on January 6th, as required by a federal law signed in March 2023.

It is in a way fitting that one of the first acts of the new Trump administration will be presidential pardons or commutations for many of the January 6th felons. Why not? Their leader will be president. Why should they languish in prison?

Jonathan V. Last, also writing on The Bulwark, observed that all of this adds up to a tragedy worthy of Euripides. Last framed his opinion piece around a comparison of the roles of then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2021 and President Joe Biden in the intervening years.

Now maybe no president could have subdued Trumpism. I’m open to that possibility. But we don’t get to run the counterfactuals. We can only judge based on the results. And the result is that President Biden succeeded in nearly every aspect of job—except in the one that mattered most.

Mike Pence enabled authoritarianism. But succeeded in stopping Trump’s coup.

Joe Biden returned normalcy to political life and governed wisely. But he presided over the resurgence and total victory of the forces of Trumpism.

It’s a uniquely American tragedy.

Last is no fan of Pence and in fact is an admirer of and advocate for Biden, so this was undoubtedly difficult for him to write. He does make some valid points, however, and lists a few things that Biden could have or should have done that might have prevented Trump's victory. But we'll never know if even those strategies would have been enough to stem the toxic tide of Trumpism. In my more cynical moments I tend to doubt it.

Forgive and forget?
It remains to be seen whether or not Trump will in fact pardon and/or commute the sentences of January 6 insurrectionists on his much-touted "Day One." To do so would be a profoundly disgraceful act, and anyone who supports it cannot truthfully claim to be a backer of law and order or of those who risk their lives to preserve law and order. In a January 6, 2025 opinion piece published on The Hill, former Capitol Police Officer Aquilino Gonell, who was seriously injured by J6 rioters, wrote:

My colleagues and I who protected the Capitol that day don’t have the privilege of forgetting the Jan. 6 riot. To me, it still feels like it was yesterday.

I served in the U.S. Army and witnessed violence in combat, but I never thought I would see similar brutality inside the U.S. Capitol. I was assaulted by rioters for five hours. I was barricading the tunnels with my body, receiving blow after blow from rioters using makeshift weapons and stolen police gear. By the end, I was covered in my own blood. Exhausted, overwhelmed and trampled, I did not know whether I would make it home to see my wife and child. Those horrible memories are seared into my brain. I will never forget that feeling.

Like many other officers who served that day, I’ve spent years in mental and physical therapy — and have undergone two surgeries to heal from those wounds — but that feeling has never truly left me. It has altered the trajectory of my career and my life. Trump and his rioters not only stole my health but also the livelihoods of me and my fellow officers. 

According to Trump and MAGA Republicans, Jan. 6, 2021, was a “day of love.” If being beaten and trampled by a violent mob is love, then Trump and the insurrectionists who attacked me under his banner nearly loved me to death. While serving that day, I wasn’t focused on the implications of the attack. I was simply doing my job.

Let me be very clear: Republicans in Congress do not support law enforcement if they support the pardons of those who attacked police officers and attempted to overthrow our government — the antithesis of law and order. 

Rewriting history can't change what actually happened
What is clear now is that there is an enormous cultural divide between those who see J6 for what it truly was, and those who think it was no big deal.

Some go beyond thinking it's NBD and apparently even find it cause for hilarity. The reich-wing satire outlet Babylon Bee recently produced a mockumentary, The Most Deadliest Day, which conveys the message that J6 coverage was driven by leftist hysteria and that the event itself was indeed NBD. I get that this is satire and that satire can be offensive, but this particular satire misses the point because its underlying premise seems to be that those who were appalled by J6 considered it to be the worst day in human history. None of us ever said or implied any such thing; we only said it was one of the worst events in modern American history -- an event that shook the guardrails and truly imperiled democracy in a way that we'd never seen in our lifetimes.

And yet Trump and his allies continue to work very hard to rewrite that history. From a January 6, 2025 opinion piece in Newsweek, written by David Faris, Associate Professor at Roosevelt University:

Trump's years-long Orwellian disinformation campaign justifying the riot as legitimate political expression and lionizing the perpetrators as heroes suffering from unjust persecution succeeded in muddying what should have been crystal-clear waters. After getting wound up with one of Trump's patented speeches featuring a firehose of lies, non-sequiturs and bombast, thousands of brainwashed MAGA die-hards descended, lemming-like, on the United States Capitol Building, scaling the walls, roaming the halls and creating violent mayhem. Some of them were armed with guns, carried zip ties and had plans to capture and possibly kill members of Congress. Others likely believed they were along for some kind of twisted joyride and seemed to be having the time of their lives.

But no sentient person illicitly roaming the halls of Congress—while elected officials and their staffs ran for their lives and hid from them—could possibly have believed that what they were doing was acceptable or legal. Four rioters died or were killed at the scene, a U.S. Capitol Police officer lost his life the following day after sustaining injuries during the melee and several other officers committed suicide in the days and weeks that followed. One hundred forty other police officers were injured in the mayhem.

Faris also rips apart the common MAGA whataboutism argument that the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter rioters weren't treated nearly as harshly as the J6 perps:

The comparison also happens to be...factually wrong. More than 17,000 people were arrested during the summer 2020 protests, and more of them have served actual jail time than the Capitol rioters. Importantly—and I can't emphasize this enough—this is in spite of the fact that none of them were seeking to murder the vice president of the United States. If you can't accept that trying to kill members of congress is worse than smashing a window at a Cheesecake Factory, I just don't know what to tell you.

Remember and resist
All spin aside, January 6, 2021 was in fact a day of shame, and millions of us will never forget, even though for years we have been scolded and told we need to "get over it" and "move on." With King DonOld ascending the throne on January 20, there will almost certainly be even more of an effort to sweep the atrocities of J6 under the rug, coupled with attempts to retaliate against the bipartisan committee of true patriots who investigated January 6, held hearings, and issued a massive report about what really happened. Regarding the threats of retaliation, J6 committee principal Jamie Raskin, one of my personal heroes, has said, "Bring it on."

“We welcome any further investigation of Jan. 6 that they want to engage in,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story while walking through the Capitol recently. “I've not seen an attack on even the smallest detail, so if they could come forward with a couple of those, then I might be able to accept what they're saying is something other than just idle political rhetoric.”

Few of us have the large platform of a Jamie Raskin or a Liz Cheney, but I think that all of us who believe in the truthful telling of American history can do our part to keep the Trumpublicans from rewriting that history. And in so doing we can possibly help push back the rising tide of authoritarianism/fascism that threatens not only America but the world at large. But it's up to us, as "God" Himself wrote on His January 6, 2025 message:

The problem isn’t just Trump—it’s the machine propping him up. It’s the money, the corporate media, and the revisionist storytelling that’s erasing what actually happened on January 6th. And if this is how we deal with an insurrection, what happens next?

No one is coming to save us. Not the corporations. Not your elected leaders. It’s truly on us. We have to unite against the billionaire class that is just fine with using fascism and propaganda to keep us all at each other’s throats.

Amen to that, God.

Related on this Whirled

July 6, 2021: Day of Rage: The most in-depth look yet at pro-Trump riot on January 6, 2021
Published on the 6-month anniversary of J6, this post highlights a must-see documentary that truly exposes the horror of the Capitol Hill riots. The embedded video is no longer available, but the YouTube link works, although the video is now age-restricted due to its intensely graphic nature. It's worth the effort to go through the steps of confirming your age in order to view it.

Before you leave...
This past year has been a nightmare for me on several counts. While money cannot make some personal nightmares go away, it can make them far easier to bear. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
• New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
• Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account of my husband, RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is a gift, which it is (as opposed to a conventional purchase, for which PayPal deducts a percentage for their fee).

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.

Breaking: James Arthur Ray, infamous "sweat lodge" guru, is dead

Notorious McSpirituality/selfish-help guru, star of the New-Wage moviemercial The Secret, and (in more recent times) devoted reich-wing conspiranoid Trumpster James Arthur Ray -- best known for his infamous deadly "sweat lodge" in Sedona, Arizona in 2009 -- passed away on the evening of January 3, 2025 [or more likely January 2; see January 7 update below]. Ray's brother John announced it on a pinned post on Ray's Xitter timeline. No cause of death was given; the brother only said that Ray passed away "suddenly and unexpectedly."

If I had to guess the cause offhand, I'd say that long term anabolic steroid use finally caught up with him. But that is pure speculation on my part, so don't quote me. I really do not know. I will update when/if I find out. I did notice that Ray's brother said that Ray's wish was to be cremated and that he didn't want people to make a big fuss about his death. I wonder if there is even going to be an autopsy, and if not... why? That might be something worth exploring, though at this point it's a little early.

So far, as I'm writing this at nearly 10:30 PM Central Standard Time, the news media do not seem to have gotten wind of the news; if you Google or Bing "James Arthur Ray death," you just get scads of results about the deaths he caused and for which he was convicted and imprisoned for a couple of years, not his own death. Nor is Ray's passing mentioned yet on his Wikipedia page.
[NOTE: SEE UPDATES AT THE END OF THIS POST. ~CC]

But some folks were paying attention, and that's how I learned about Ray's demise. Through their organization, Seek Safely, the family of Kirby Brown, one of Ray's Sedona death lodge victims, made a statement, which said in part:

While there could be some small measure of relief in knowing that Ray will no longer be able to harm anyone, it is, truly, very little comfort. It became clear to us early on after Kirby’s passing that Ray was just one operator in a multi-billion dollar per year industry built on the exploitation of those who would improve their lives and find fulfillment. The rot in this industry has always been much greater and more complex than the actions of a single so-called “guru.” James Ray was one among countless exploitative and dangerous self-help providers. SEEK Safely was founded in this reality—that an entire industry, not just one man, was responsible for Kirby’s death.

Greater than any sense of relief is a feeling of disappointment that Ray could have played a unique role in helping to define both the problems and the solutions for this industry. But rather than demonstrating true transformation, he remained stuck in the paradigm of an industry built on manipulation and mistruth.

We can only, at this juncture, remind seekers that no “guru,” or program, or mindset is larger than life or without fault. That a journey of self-improvement is noble and vulnerable. That we must always remain in charge of that process of growth and change, rooted in our values, our worth, and our right to seek free from harm.

That's exactly right. Ray's death won't clear an entire industry of its rot, any more than Trump's eventual demise will, after all the years of damage, clear America and the world of Trumpism/fascism. There are no neat and tidy endings.

While it would be inaccurate and certainly crass for me to say that I am giddy about James Arthur Ray's passing, it would also be inaccurate for me to say that I'm sad about it. Ray had many chances to try to redeem himself after causing the deaths of his followers; instead, he never stopped making their deaths all about him and the wrongs he had suffered because people were unfairly blaming him for "a tragic accident." Now, on the surface it may have seemed that he took responsibility, especially since the introduction to a book he penned a few years ago, The Business of Redemption, began with the sentence, "I am responsible for the deaths of three people." Then he goes on to write about how deeply this hurts him every single day.

But instead of actually taking responsibility, he found ways to crapitalize on his imagined status as a drawn-and-quartered martyr: a survivor of a trial by fire (literally and figuratively) who was abundantly qualified to guide others, for a hefty price of course, on their own journeys from darkness back to light. And he was still flogging that hero narrative to the end. In December 2024 he was featured on a conspiranoia/alt-health podcast called The Ripple Effect, hosted by a guy named Ricky Varandas; the blurb for the promo clip on Varandas' TwitterX page read, "From Prison to Purpose: My Hero's Journey to Redemption." Gimme a break.

I know that Ray had people who loved him. But again, I would be lying if I were to say that I'm sorry he's gone. 

UPDATE 5 January 2025:

• Some of the Arizona news media have picked up on the story since I published this post last night (January 4, 2025) at 10:43 PM Central Standard Time. NBC affiliate 12 News (KPNX, serving the greater Phoenix area) posted news about James Arthur Ray's death on Saturday night, January 4, at 10:25 PM Mountain Standard Time (11:25 PM my time), and updated it at 11:10 PM MST (12:10 AM January 5 my time). No cause of death has been mentioned as of this time. News 12 cited the same sources I did: the Xitter statement by Ray's brother John, and the Seek Safely statement.
• AZ Central (Arizona Republic) posted a brief story as well today, January 5, at about 3:30 PM my time (2:30 Mountain Standard Time). As was the case with the 12 News story, the only sources cited were the Xitter statement by Ray's brother, and the Seek Safely statement. No cause of death has been mentioned as of this time.
• The Wikipedia page for James Arthur Ray was updated on the morning of January 5, 2025, and now mentions his death, but only the date; the source cited is the Arizona News 12 story listed above. No cause of death has been mentioned as of this time.

UPDATE 6 January 2025:

Some former followers who knew James Ray personally have privately speculated to me that his death might have been due to drug overdose or interaction. And some folks, myself included, have not been above wondering, if only in passing, if perhaps Ray was in some deep trouble and, with the help of his family, faked his own death. That sort of scenario is normally a little bit conspiranoid for my taste, but sometimes you just wonder...

In any case, AP finally got hold of the story today, and mentioned only this regarding cause of death:

In a post on X, his family announced that Ray died “suddenly and unexpectedly” late last week but didn’t specify the cause...

...Stephanie Wheatley, a spokesperson for Clark County in Nevada where was Ray residing, said it had received a death report of a man matching Ray’s name and age.

I'm a little busy right now, but anyone who wants to pursue this further might try the Clark County NV coroner's page, which will direct you to a PDF that you can perhaps fill out online and ask for more detailed information. Good luck! Let me know if you find out anything.

UPDATE 7 January 2025:

I got a few free moments and decided to send an email to the Clark County NV coroner today, asking for confirmation of James Arthur Ray's death, and inquiring whether cause of death was known yet and if there would be an autopsy. Here's the reply I received:

Hi Connie,

The Clark County Office of the Coroner/Medical Examiner does not have jurisdiction over this case. I can only confirm the CCOCME did receive a report of a decedent with the name of James Ray, age 67. The date of death was 1/2/25.

Not all deaths in Clark County are CCOCME cases. Some examples of non-coroner cases include those where the decedent was in the long-term care of a doctor and/or had extensive medical history.

I'm guessing there won't be an autopsy, and if he's really deceased there won't be a body to poke, only embers.

I thought it was interesting that according to the email, the report the Clark County coroner's office received said the date of death was January 2, 2025. But brother John's tweet was dated the morning of January 4, and he clearly said that James had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly "last night' -- which would have been January 3, not January 2. It's possible that John was just copying and pasting an earlier message that had actually been written on January 3, and when he posted to James' Xitter feed on January 4 he neglected to edit it to reflect the actual date of death. In any case, Wikipedia has his date of death as January 3, 2025, but the source they cited was probably using the post on James' Xitter feed as a reference.

But to me the main issue is the cause of death, and the mystery continues... And I do need to state that in general I respect a family's right to privacy, especially regarding medical matters. However, when a public figure like Ray brands himself as an expert on physical as well as mental and emotional and spiritual health, and then dies "suddenly and unexpectedly," his public has a right to know what killed him.

Before you leave...
This past year has been a nightmare for me on several counts. While money cannot make some personal nightmares go away, it can make them far easier to bear. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
• New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
• Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account of my husband, RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is a gift, which it is (as opposed to a conventional purchase, for which PayPal deducts a percentage for their fee).

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.

The worst year of our lives. At least of mine.

I don’t want to remember 2024. I want it to be over. There’s a decent chance 2025 will be worse, but we have nothing to gain by clinging to its predecessor. Let midnight come, then let’s get on with it.
~ Timothy Noah, New Republic, December 31, 2024

Oh, my fu--ing god, good riddance to 2024, which has been, as far as I'm concerned, the worst year in recent memory for America (including for basic American decency), as well as for world democracy -- in addition to being the worst year ever for me personally. For me this has been a year of profound losses, some of which I am not yet ready to write about publicly. Suffice it to say for now that for the first time in my life, I feel like a... survivor. Because that is what I am.

Still, I'm old enough to know that the end of one year and the beginning of a new one does not automatically mean a fresh new beginning. As I noted in a Christmas Eve post I wrote seven years ago, with the exception of mayhem committed by bad actors who plan their atrocities around holidays or other special dates, the shit that happens has absolutely no regard for the calendar. Moreover, 2024's exit brings us that much closer to the second coronation of King DonOld, so there's that.

Still...I haven't given up, and I have no intention of doing so. Regarding the collective malaise, we resisted eight years ago and are simply going to have to resist harder this time around. There are still causes and people worth fighting for, and we gotta do it.

As for my personal dramas, I am stumbling through them the best I can, my dark path brightened immeasurably by the support of dear friends. Y'all know who you are.

For now, I'm signing off until next year, which for me is just a few hours away, and depending upon where you are on the planet, it may already be next year for you. I hope 2025 is as good a year as possible for you. I even dare to hope that those of us who are facing the new year with trepidation actually experience some pleasant surprises for a change. Hey, it could happen.

So as Timothy Noah at New Republic said in his eulogy for 2024, "Let midnight come, then let’s get on with it."

Thank you for visiting my Whirled, and I'll see you again soon.

Before you leave...
While money cannot make some personal nightmares go away, it can make them far easier to bear. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
• New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
• Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account of my husband, RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is a gift, which it is (as opposed to a conventional purchase, for which PayPal deducts a percentage for their fee).

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.

In the name of the father, the son, and the wholly outraged

The big news that broke late on Sunday, December 1, 2024 was President Joe Biden's sweeping and unconditional pardon of his troubled son Hunter on firearms purchase violations and tax evasion charges, as well as a granting of clemency for Hunter's conduct dating back to January 1, 2014. This apparently took lots of folks by surprise, Biden supporters and detractors alike, as the president had been so adamant for such a long time about taking the high road, insisting that he would let the wheels of "justice" turn as they would and that he absolutely would not intervene in his son's cases.

But he changed his mind. In the official statement about the reasons he did this, he wrote, in part:

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough. 
 
For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.

Well, a lot of Americans, including me, do understand and support the president's decision, but not surprisingly he is also facing a torrent of outrage. To me the backlash seems to be more extreme than any of the reactions against DonOld Trump's continual fascist threats and utterly appalling administration appointees. It could be that Trump is so profoundly awful and evil in every way that the commentariat have become numb to it all. It's no longer news when Trump threatens to do, or actually does, something else that will further hasten the wholesale destruction of American democracy. But when Biden, who unlike Trump has always been held to higher standards, does something that goes against the grain... well, now, that's a scandal.

Bring on the backlash
It's no big shocker that the reich-wing/rethuglican pearl clutchers are fuming about the injustice of it all, claiming that Biden is a hypocrite and that the pardon is a blatant attempt to "avoid accountability." (Given their choice for "president," rethuglicans talking about "accountability" is a joke in and of itself.)

Any jokers who are okay with the lineup of scoundrels who benefited from Trump's last-minute pardons and commutations a few years ago have zero room to criticize the pardoning of Hunter Biden. NBC News (January 20, 2021) published the list.

Trump had abused his pardon power earlier in his administration as well, as I wrote about on this Whirled back in June of 2018. (He never did pardon or commute the sentence of serial scammer and all-too-frequent Whirled subject Kevin Trudeau, though.)

And here, straight from the Department of Justice, is a complete list of pardons and commutations during Trump's first term. Several of these scumbags have already been granted a place in the next Trump administration.

But the backlash against the president hasn't just been coming from the reich. Even some (though by no means all) Democrats and liberals are wagging their fingers, as reported by Axios, among numerous other sources.

In an opinion piece by Matt Ford on The New Republic site, the headline reads, "The Hunter Biden Pardon Is Joe Biden’s Ultimate Failure." Ford describes Biden's time in office as a "failed presidency," seemingly basing that assessment on the fact that Biden broke his promise to "restore good government, protect American democracy, and cure the republic of Trumpism." (Apparently the numerous actual accomplishments that the Biden administration managed despite what turned out to be the out-of-control plague of Trumpism are irrelevant.)

Ford grouses that Biden broke his oath of office and that pardoning Hunter is "a quintessentially corrupt act" because the president is using his awesome presidential power to protect his own child -- but hasn't extended his pardon power to numerous others who are also clearly in danger from the Trumpublican wrecking ball. (Pssst, Matt, Joe still has a few weeks to add to the pardon list.)

In short, to Ford, this pardon is a blatant abuse of power.

To his credit, Ford acknowledges that Trump himself abused the presidential pardon power in the past and that he is planning to do it again "in even more grotesquely self-interested ways" -- and that he would have done this whether Biden pardoned his son or not. Nevertheless Ford insists that none of this excuses Biden's act of pardoning his own son. And he seems to be on the crowded bandwagon -- a bandwagon that includes Trump himself -- of those who believe that this one single act by President Biden clearly paves the way for Trump to go full speed ahead with his own pardon orgy.

That's nonsense.

Trump's gonna do what he's gonna do, regardless of what anyone else does or doesn't do
As even Matt Ford and other critics have noted -- and it cannot be overstated -- everyone who has been paying attention for the past nine years knows that Trump was and is always going to do whatever the hell he wants to do, with no respect for protocol or high standards or the rule of law. Most notably, ever since he launched his 2024 campaign — long before President Biden pardoned Hunter — Trump has been promising that if re-elected he will free and pardon virtually all of the convicted and/or imprisoned January 6 “patriots” and “political prisoners,” including the most violent ones.

In addition, he is hellbent on aggressively weaponizing the justice system and every tool within his reach to prosecute his political opponents as well as those within the justice system who have advanced the numerous cases against him, and journalists who have reported honestly on his lies and misdeeds.

Even though Trump lies about pretty much everything else, we have no reason to disbelieve him when he makes these threats. And he is building powerful alliances to help him carry out his threats.

As someone on a Xitter thread about this matter wrote, Biden's pardon of his son is not a green light for Trump, who was going to run the red light anyway. So those who are whining about Hunter’s pardon as if it were THE event that broke the last guardrail -- and who are insisting that anyone who supports the pardon can no longer claim the moral or legal high ground -- should really just sit this one out.

Now, could President Biden have handled the whole thing better? Probably. In a December 2 opinion piece on Intelligencer, legal analyst Elie Honig wrote that the president made all of this much harder than it needed to be on himself, Hunter, and the justice system. Honig wrote that instead of being so insistent that he would never, ever intervene in his son's cases, Biden could have just offered a standard political hedge: “I haven’t fully considered it yet, but I’ll examine it carefully when the time is right, and I’ll do what I believe is in the best interest of justice.”

Moreover, Honig added, he "could have positioned the pardon as a merits-based decision on which reasonable minds can disagree. Instead, he broke out the sanctimony and cried victimhood while breaking his unequivocal promise to the American public."

Well, Mr. Honig, even though your opinion piece is marginally more nuanced than that of numerous other critics, it seems that you're pouring on the sanctimony too. We'll just have to agree to disagree about your opinion that Biden has "tarnished his own legacy and undermined the very justice system he claims to so deeply revere." In his statement about the pardon/clemency, the president acknowledged that he had always been a strong supporter of the justice system, but that it has been grievously misused in this case. And I think he made a pretty clear and honest case about the merits of his decision, and why he changed his mind about pardoning his son.

What the critics are missing: there's a huge difference between a lie and a genuine change of heart
Critics of the pardon, including Elie Honig, have repeatedly whined that Biden "lied" to the American public. They're operating under the assumption that Biden never really intended to stick to his vow to butt out of his son's cases, and that an ultimate pardon was what he had in mind all along. That would be the definition of a lie in this case: a deliberate attempt to deceive or to hide one's real intentions.

But I am willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt. I think Biden really did intend to keep his promise, and that he was still clinging, however tenuously, to that intention even a few days after the disastrous 2024 election, when his press secretary, in answer to a question, said that the president still had no plans to pardon Hunter.

But extraordinary circumstances can crack even the strongest intentions. In the weeks after that statement at the presser, which seem like years in some ways, it became increasingly apparent that Hunter was most likely in real jeopardy from the Mango Mussolini mafia. Trump's recent announcement that he'd picked rabid Trump toady Kash Patel to head the FBI -- which he'd actually wanted to do during his first term -- could very well have been the last straw for Biden and his family.

Patel, like his orange idol, is obsessed with revenge against any and all factions who have stood up to Trump, including Trump's political opponents and their families. As Ron Filipkowski noted on Xitter December 2:

MONTHS AFTER Joe said he would not pardon Hunter, Trump won the election & appointed a man as FBI Director who has spent the last 4 years on every right-wing podcast ranting that he was going to go after Hunter. Obsessed with him. Were you aware of that, critics? Not relevant?

I'd say it's pretty damn relevant.

And I really do think that President Biden should get busy with some additional sweeping preemptive pardons, which at the very least should include everybody on the enemies list that Krazy Kash published in his 2023 magnum dopus, Government Gangsters. Here's one place where you can read that list, which includes Joe Biden himself as well as Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, current FBI director Christopher Wray, Merrick Garland, Bill Barr, John Bolton, Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill, Cassidy Hutchinson, and even some of Trump's former communications team members, such as Alyssa Farah Griffin (currently a co-host on The View) and Stephanie Grisham.

Would that be an abuse of the presidential pardon power? The reich will surely say yea, but again, given their dear leader's history and promised future of gross abuse of power -- including prosecution of the people on Kash's enemies list -- they have no room to squawk.

Real reasons for outrage
One would expect the reich to march lockstep with Der Furor, but the wholly outraged in the center and on the left really should find something more substantial to be outraged about than a father protecting his son from the thugs and criminals who had been gunning for both father and son for years -- most notably, the fact that Trump and many of those thugs and criminals are coming after all of us in 2025. America and the rest of the "free world" may never recover. From The Bulwark:

The theory here is simple: Trump will do what he has repeatedly promised to do and what he started doing in his first term. He will impose widespread tariffs, undercutting the postwar open trade regime, which disincentivizes conflict by promoting economic interdependence. He will break commitments to democratic allies and cozy up to authoritarians. Defenders of the U.S.-led international order from Trump’s first term, such as Secretary of Defense James Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly won’t be there to slow it down. In their stead will be enablers, including Russia sympathizers. The administration will act without fear of impeachment, legal punishment, or loss of re-election, because Trump already overcame all three...

That's what you should be making you outraged, and scared as hell. And don't tell me that it's possible and prudent to focus on both the outrage over Hunter being pardoned and the outrage over Trump and gang's plans. I know it's possible. I'm just saying that it's a stupid waste of precious energy, not to mention that it's grossly unfair to President Biden, to be outraged over this pardon.

Before you leave...
All politics aside, this has been, for several reasons that have nothing to do with politics, a nightmare of a year for me personally. Money, alas, cannot make the nightmare go away, but it can make it far easier to bear. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
• New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
• Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account of my husband, RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is a gift, which it is (as opposed to a conventional purchase, for which PayPal deducts a percentage for their fee).

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.

Veterans Day: Those who have served will be ill-served by Trump and Project 2025 (and/or Elon & Vivek's austerity cartel)

Today, November 11, we in the Divided States of America observed Veterans Day, a holiday known in other parts of the world as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. By any name, the original purpose of the holiday was to commemorate the end of World War I, which turned out not to be the "war to end all wars" as it had been billed back in the day, but whose end was nonetheless a cause for celebration. The US has since expanded the holiday to pay tribute, at least via lip service, impassioned patriotic memes, and mattress sales, not only to those who fought in the first World War but to all who have served our country throughout its history.

But because of what happened on November 5, on this November 11 the words, "Thank you for your service" are ringing even more hollow than usual.

As someone who is married to a US Navy veteran and is keenly interested in the laws and policies that most directly affect veterans, I am deeply saddened by the ways our vets are almost certainly going to get the shaft from the incoming regime. To put it succinctly: #NeverWasMyPresident King Donold John Trump, aka Cadet Bone Spurs -- who has consistently disrespected veterans despite the fact that so many of them continue to support him -- is no friend of the men and women who have served.

In my Election Day post I wrote about a conversation I'd had the Friday before the election with three senior-aged male veterans on a VA shuttle bus. All three were all in for Trump and had already early-voted for him, their main issues apparently being border security, meat prices, and the Green New Deal. In the interests of keeping the peace with my new friends, I kept my own political opinions to myself, but what I so badly wanted to say was, "If Trump wins... just wait until you see your VA benefits decimated."

Well... Donold won. I really would love to be proven wrong about what he and his well-funded, well-organized thug cartels are going to do to our veterans as well as to our active military, but I'm afraid it's gonna be bad.

There is a big movement by the thugs to outsource and privatize much if not all of VA healthcare, and to cut costs by slashing many of the benefits that vets now enjoy. The big bugaboo is Project 2025, of which Trump has spent the past year feigning ignorance and which, if implemented, would greatly reduce or completely end many veterans' hard-earned benefits. In a July 2024 opinion piece on Task & Purpose, Russell B. Lemle and Jasper Craven wrote:

Project 2025 proposes several alarming recommendations that could significantly reduce veterans’ access to healthcare. One would realign healthcare benefits to cover only “service-connected conditions,” – i.e., medical or mental health problems that were acquired or exacerbated by military service. Currently, once veterans prove they have a service-related condition, they can receive care for that problem as well as other conditions that they may develop. For example, a veteran whose leg was amputated in the military would not only have lifetime care for that problem, but also for the high blood pressure or cancer that they develop, in civilian life.

The Heritage blueprint argues for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to eliminate some clinical services that “don’t align with service-connected conditions.” If this strategy to authorize care based on service-connected disabilities is taken to its logical extension, other care, like for an amputee’s hypertension in the example above, would no longer be furnished. There are five million veterans who have a service-connected designation, and they all potentially stand to lose access for the bulk of their healthcare needs. Two million veterans without a service-connected designation could potentially be disenrolled from VA healthcare entirely. Such a draconian concept accords with the Koch-backed group Concerned Veterans for America, whose Veterans Independence Act proposes “tightening eligibility requirements for new enrollees at a certain date in order to reorient the VA back towards its mission of providing care for service-connected disabled veterans.” It is also a goal espoused in the Heritage Foundation’s Budget Blueprint for Fiscal Year 2023. 

Ahead of the election, numerous other sources repeated the warnings about Project 2025, among these being the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which in an October 23, 2024 piece noted:

The Veterans Administration (VA) health system is also targeted by Project 2025. It plans to eliminate VA hospitals and health clinics and replace them with privatized outpatient clinics. This would have an especially considerable impact on Veterans living in rural areas. Project 2025 even calls for the privatization of TRICARE, the active duty service members (ADSMs) health system, threatening to drive up health care costs for millions of servicemembers and their families.

And in an August 29, 2024 article in the Pennsylvania Independent, Will Fritz wrote:

The [2025] playbook’s chapter on the Department of Veterans Affairs calls for ensuring “political control of the VA” on day one by replacing civil servants with political appointees. It says the next Republican administration in the White House should rescind VA directives that mandate the provision of abortion services, which it calls “a medical procedure unrelated to military service that the VA lacks the legal authority and clinical proficiency to perform.”

It proposes rescinding any clinical policy directives “that are contrary to principles of conservative governance,” beginning with abortion services as well as gender-affirming care, though its authors don’t specify exactly what those principles are.

“On reproductive health care, the project does seek to ban the use of public funds to facilitate reproductive health care and abortion for active service members, and that does strip away critical health care for millions of women and further pushing them away from serving in the military, potentially,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan legal services group that works to expose corruption in the executive branch.

And, as so many other sources have warned (but it can't be overstated), veterans with disabilities will be particularly hard hit.

The playbook argues that the next Republican administration in the White House should make plans to curtail veterans’ disability benefits.

The VA assigns veterans a disability rating for disabilities caused or aggravated by active duty service, ranging from 10% to 100% in increments of 10%. Veterans with a disability rating receive tax-free benefits.

Project 2025 suggests reducing those benefits. It states that the next Republican administration should speed up a review of disability rating criteria in order to save money while preserving benefits for future claims.

The legalese in the document belies the truth of the plan, according to Michael Embrich, a former policy advisor to the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs: “They would go through every veteran who’s been rated, who currently gets their veteran’s — what they call benefit compensation check every month, and they would say, Hey, we want to take a look and see if you still have tinnitus. And if they determine you don’t, they want to take your benefit away, which is kind of unheard of.”

Revising disability ratings for future claimants would mean many disabled veterans wouldn’t get benefits at all, and the plan’s stated goal of “preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants” would allow them to cut benefits even for veterans who have already completed their service and are receiving benefits that they have rightfully earned and rely on, Embrich said.

In August of 2024, to commemorate the anniversary of the signing into law of the Biden administration's popular PACT Act, Democrats.org presented a list of sources offering insight into just how bad Trump 2.0 and Project 2025 would be for veterans and active-duty military. Among those sources was a July 4, 2024 piece in Raw Story that warned:

Among other recommendations, the [Project 2025] plan proposes eliminating concurrent eligibility for both service-related disability benefits and military retirement benefits, which [Brooks D.] Tucker [Trump's chief of staff for Trump's second VA secretary Robert Wilkie] says would reduce mandatory outlays by at least $160 billion through 2032, and revising the disability rating awards that determine eligibility for benefits and determine monthly disability compensation to reap "significant cost savings."

The plan also proposes to end enrollment in VA medical care for veterans in two low-priority groups to save an estimated $69 billion through 2032 and narrow eligibility for veterans disability by excluding disabilities that cannot be related to military service, which would save an estimated $37.6 billion during that same period.

Even worse (and as also noted in the APWU piece cited above, though the quote below is from the Raw Story piece):

Tucker recommends the expansion of Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOC) rather that maintaining or upgrading "obsolete" or "unaffordable" VA health care campuses that currently provide inpatient services, emergency care and other health services in one location.

The Michael DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, where my husband receives his healthcare, is one such campus that provides all of those services in one location, and it has been a blessing for us, especially since we don't have a working vehicle right now and can't just zip back and forth all over the state from specialist to specialist in order for him to get the care he needs. Under the thumbs of the reich-wing cost cutters, however, the DeBakey Center and others like it across the country might very well go the way of the republican party's regard for the Constitution. And that would be an egregious disservice not only for my husband but for hundreds of thousands of others who served our country honorably and deserve the best care possible.

* * * * *

I get that a lot of MAGAts are in deep denial about Project 2025, having been taken in by Trump's and the Heritage Foundation's efforts, in the wake of public outrage, to convince the rubes that Trump and P-2025 are not at all connected. (Here's a link to the denial page on the Project 2025 site.)

The MAGAts' denial really hit home for me when I began participating in a discussion on a Facebook group in which the majority of participants were clearly Trumpsters. Someone asked, "What do you think of Project 2025?" Most of the responses were earnest claims that Trump and the Heritage Foundation's pet project had absolutely nothing to do with each other, and that the alarmism about P-2025 was a fabrication of those lying, scheming Democrats. One person even claimed that the Heritage Foundation had endorsed Kamala (not true; one person formerly associated with the Heritage Foundation decades ago, Mickey Edwards, endorsed her. But the Trumpanzee making this claim would not accept this, and insisted that she was right.).

A few of us in the group respectfully disagreed with the claim that Trump and P-2025 weren't connected, and we provided numerous links to support our argument. We were for the most part rewarded with Facebook's laugh emoji and the expected name-calling. I was called a left-wing loony, a communist, and an idiot. There's no convincing the cult, so I gave up trying.

Whether or not one chooses to believe that Trump and P-2025 are connected, however, there's no denying the connection between Trump and the new Evil Musk/Vivek Ramasmarmy austerity cartel, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Unfortunately, there's a good chance that DOGE will be as ruthless as Project 2025 when it comes to cutting benefits for our veterans.

I'd be remiss if I were to gloss over the fact that when Trump was president the first time, some good things actually were done for veterans, although Trump falsely took credit for some actions that were not in fact his doing. But Biden arguably did more for our vets, and no doubt Kamala Harris would have continued and perhaps expanded on that trend. (Here's the rundown on what both Trump and Biden did for veterans.)

I'm afraid that those three male vets I talked with, and many thousands of others who voted for Trump, are in for a rude awakening. Frankly I don't see how any veteran or active military service member could support the man who called those who made the ultimate sacrifice in World War I "suckers" and "losers," and who once described his sexual escapades in his youth as his "own personal Vietnam." But I guess his military and vet supporters either rationalize that all of this is fake news, or that it's simply not important because he is going to fix inflation and the border and he's going to make America great for them. Believing these things is their choice, of course. It's just too bad that when they made their choice for president, they were voting squarely against their own best interests as well as the interests of most Americans.

In recent months I have been making frequent trips to the DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston where, as I indicated above, my veteran husband receives his healthcare. There is a wall in the front lobby area with a framed photo of the Commander in Chief. It's going to be a grievous insult, not only to my husband but to every veteran who walks those endless halls, to see Trump’s smirking orange mug on that wall.

This post has been updated to include the information about the Department of Government Efficiency. ~ CC

Before you leave...
All politics aside, this has been, for several reasons that have nothing to do with politics, a nightmare of a year for me personally. Money, alas, cannot make the nightmare go away, but it can make it far easier to bear. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
• New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
• Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account of my husband, RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is a gift, which it is (as opposed to a conventional purchase, for which PayPal deducts a percentage for their fee).

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.