If you have a landline still or have your mobile phone set up to receive messages, I have been complimented (or had comments) on my message. I am posting that message for your use with no strings attached if you desire to use it.
Hello, we are not accepting calls for any special deals or fantastic promotions, we will accept calls from family, friends and known business associates. If we do not know you or recognize your number or if you do not leave a number, we will not call you back and we will report your number to the National do not call registry. Have a nice day.
Consequences result from all actions and spoken words. Since the advent of the “Newt Gingrich” era of politics word more than actions have been the primary source of agitation. Newt was a major influencer of using “certain words” to convey underlying meanings. He along with the “moral Majority” and other “noveau” groups took to airwaves and other media expressing many ideas that have become mainstream now. The Right” has long been advocates of Government over reach for their purposes while suppressing Government activities that benefit a majority of citizens. It would take a minimum of 3- 4 tomes to explain the ways our society has been changed (attacked) by the extremes of both hands (right and left), the tough part is teasing out the facts which has been left to us the readers and consumers of news and information. Key to information (factual information) is spread over many sources and it has been left to the reader (consumer) to collect and understand. Facts never change while the opposite of facts constantly shifts.
Recently I was told about a younger friend who had foot amputated due to diabetes. This not unusual to have limbs removed due to the disease however in this case all symptoms were ignored for perhaps years. This is an issue with me in that Men in general fail to pay attention to their health and or ignore changes in their health. 20 years ago, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, while the detection was early, and the disease contained in the gland itself I elected to have it surgically removed. At that time there were few options other than surgery, those options were, chemo, radiation and “radioactive” seed implants. Depending on general health, chemo, radiation can cause strokes or near strokes. There is the chance of the disease spreading with other remedies, surgical removal often offers the best remedy with one of its side effects being erectile dysfunction. Other side effects can occur but what most men are concerned about is ED -THERE IS A PILL FOR THIS! There is no pill or remedy for death if you do not monitor this health issue (or any other). Any other side effects usually can be addressed in some form by your physician (if you have one). I vehemently urge men to get physician you like and have regular visits to insure your health. Get real with your health and you will live a better life or just live! To paraphrase “Smokey Bear”- Only you can save your life with regular health visits!
Comments Off on Postal Malfeasance? or Political Ignorance?
Louis DeJoy (born June 20, 1957) is an American businessman serving as the 75th U.S. postmaster general. He was appointed in May 2020 by the Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service (USPS). Prior to the appointment, he was the founder and CEO of the logistics and freight company New Breed Logistics and was a major Republican Party donor and fundraiser for Donald Trump.[1] DeJoy is the first postmaster general since 1992 without any previous experience in the USPS.[2] His companies still hold active service contracts with the USPS, generating controversy over conflict of interest.[3]
DeJoy was criticized for cost-reduction policies enacted after assuming office in June 2020, including eliminating overtime, and banning late or additional trips to deliver mail. The Postal Service also continued responding to long-term declines in first class mail volume with ongoing decommissioning of hundreds of high-speed mail-sorting machines and removal of the lower-volume mail collection boxes from streets. These practices were also criticized as mail delivery became delayed. The changes took place during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, raising fears that the changes would interfere with voters who used mail-in voting to cast their ballots, possibly intentionally. Congressional committees and the USPS inspector general investigated. In August of that year, amid public pressure, DeJoy said that the changes would be suspended until after the election,[4] and in October the USPS agreed to reverse all of them.[5]
In March 2021, DeJoy issued a 10-year plan called “Delivering for America” to stabilize the finances of the Postal Service by slowing first class mail delivery, optimizing transportation networks, cutting post office hours, and raising prices. The plan assumed Congress would relieve the USPS of the requirement to pre-pay retiree health care costs, which with DeJoy’s urging it did with the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022.
DeJoy attracted criticism and lawsuits from environmentalists and Democratic governments when he decided to purchase 90% gasoline-powered delivery vehicles in 2022, which he justified in part by the agency’s financial situation. After additional federal funding was provided by the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 and Inflation Reduction Act, DeJoy revised these plans twice; the final version orders 83% electric vehicles through 2028 and 100% electric thereafter.
I put the current Postmaster general’s Bio to explain my comments (opinion). Mr. De Joy is a Trump crony who along with Trump has no idea how the postal service works. While the agency has and still has problems (all solvable). The agency requires someone who can look beyond the issues that do not plague ordinary businesses. The postmaster General cannot be fired by the Congress or the President. The Board of Governors have that authority. At this time there are 5 Republicans on the board and that may be the block to fire De Joy. Until some moderate board members are elected there will be a Dejoy in control with no real direction as to improving the postal service. There is no Joy in having DeJoy.
Information overload has caused a gap in facts. The fact that the conservative right, right, far right have quietly been remaking our educational system. They have changed or erased parts of history to keep modern learners ignorant of the real origins of our country that include the good, bad and ugly. History is history and remains unchanged until the manipulators get a hold of it. It has always been incumbent on the learners to source out what true and what is not. It is irrational to follow “the party line” for the sake of deceiving the public and pushing agendas against the public and sometimes national interests. The first world war was started by an assassination based on a rumor or perceived injustice. World war 2 was started by almost the same reasons with the help of (then) modern communication methods. Now the same bad actors are updated with the advent of the world wide web and its associated components (“X”, Google, Microsoft, etc.).
Again, the onus is on the public to be wary of mass communication and become skeptics of what is being reported as facts. Investigating information is fairly easy compared to 5 or 10 years ago, it just requires reading which again is not what it used to be. Something as simple as ‘cursive” writing is foreign to many younger people along with books about real history. Books are the ever-giving resource for information hence the “selective ban” on certain books which have been mainstays in our educational system. It is ironic that many of the banning’s occur in Southern, Republican states under the guise of fighting against “woke”(whatever that means). It is well to remember that the Modern Republicans bear no resemblance to past Republicans while against some Democratic agendas, made a way to function for the country through the fog of disagreement.
Benjamin Netanyahu has proven how little control or compassion he has a leader. Let’s just get something said: Hamas and other decidedly anti-Israel entities are terrorists! The many opportunities to establish a Palestinian state have been wasted. That area has seen wars and bloodshed for years with at best many uneasy Peaces. There have been opportunities to create a lasting peace but the people who had the possibility or ability to create a Palestinian state and allow Israel to coexist within the area are gone. Their removal has allowed Dictators and radicals to assume and take power in the vacuum. Currently we have a entire population that is now becoming enemies of Israel when all they wanted was a state of their own. True enough the radical Palestinians in association with other bad actors from surrounding countries have contributed to the Chaos but the recent events have set the course of peace back years.
The solution is now more distant but still possible with the right people in the right places and in cooperation the moderates on all sides.
‘Trump isn’t fun anymore’: Columnist claims MAGA leader’s greatest charm has died
Story by Adam Nichols- RAW STORY
• 21h • 2 min read
The dancing, joking, story-telling persona that helped lure Donald Trump’s adoring MAGA base has become a casualty of Kamala Harris’ campaign, a columnist wrote Friday.
And she based the revelation on Trump’s emergence from days of Mar-a-Lago isolation to give a news conference Thursday that many commentators described as a chaotic event suggesting a flailing campaign.
“He was dour and angry and frankly is starting to look a whole lot older, just in the past few months,” Parton wrote.
“He’s not enjoying himself and it shows and, compared to the excited crowds greeting Harris and Walz this week, this sad, pathetic appearance seemed almost funereal.”
Parton wrote that the change was fully down to Biden stepping aside and Harris taking the mantle as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. Even facing possible prison time in four criminal prosecutions hadn’t dampened his spirits as much.
“Donald Trump is in a bad way,” she wrote.
Parton went on, “I think he’s considering for the first time that he might lose again and he is not psychologically equipped to deal with that reality.
“Sure, he’ll fight it and tell his supporters that it was stolen and perhaps even incite more violence. But deep down he knows he might actually lose just as he knows deep down that he lost in 2020. There’s a look of panic in his eyes right now.
“If he fails this time he might just break apart at the seams. “
To some fanfare, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign today launched Republicans for Harris, which will kick off with events this week in the swing states of Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Their goal, campaign officials told Zeke Miller of the Associated Press, is to make it easier for Republican voters put off by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to back Democratic presidential nominee Harris. Curiously, though, in their embrace of the nation’s growing democratic coalition, Republicans crossing the aisle in 2024 are returning to their party’s origins.
The Republican Party itself began as a coalition that came together to stand against an oligarchy whose leaders were explicit about their determination to overthrow democracy. As wealth had accumulated in the hands of a small group of elite southern enslavers, those men had turned against American democracy. “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are created equal,’” South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond said.
Enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia rejected the other key principle of the Declaration of Independence: that everyone has a right to a say in the government under which they live. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” he wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “[b]ut we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”
Enslavers like Hammond and Fitzhugh believed that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to impose their will on everyone else. If they did not, men like Fitzhugh believed, poor men and marginalized people would insist on being equal, receiving the value of their work and living as they wished.
Under this dangerous system, Fitzhugh wrote, “society is insensibly, and often unconsciously, marching to the utter abandonment of the most essential institutions—religion, family ties, property, and the restraints of justice.” He defended human enslavement as the highest form of society, since paternalistic Christian masters would care for their wards, preventing a world of “No-Government and Free Love.”
The elite enslavers came to control the Democratic Party and, through it, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. The Whig Party tried for decades to make peace with the increasingly extremist southern Democrats, and as they did so, the party splintered, with those opposed either to human enslavement or the spread of human enslavement to the West—those were actually not the same thing—creating their own upstart parties.
And then, in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers managed to push through the Senate a bill to organize the two giant territories of Kansas and Nebraska in such a way that they would be able to spread their system across the American West. The new slave states that would form there would be able to join forces in the House of Representatives with the southern slave states to outvote the northern states that rejected enslavement. Without a brake on their ambitions, the enslavers would be able to spread their worldview across the nation. From their position at the head of the United States, they expected to spread their slave-based economy around the globe.
But their triumph was not to be. With the bill under debate in the Senate, Democrat Amos Tuck of New Hampshire—the state Pierce hailed from—wrote: “Now let Frank Pierce consummate his treason, if he dare. There is a North, thank God!… We have…rebuked treason, condemned the Nebraska Bill, and discarded the President.” Tuck noted that the Democrats were losing “their best men. I think they (the leaders) can never recover from the consequences of having tried to betray their country.” He looked forward to “bringing out in future the true characteristics of our people, so long belied by the most unworthy demagogues….”
Tuck was not alone. The day after the House of Representatives began to debate the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Whig representative Israel Washburn of Maine invited about thirty antislavery representatives to meet at the rooms of his friends, Massachusetts representatives Thomas D. Eliot and Edward Dickinson (whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poetry), in Mrs. Crutchett’s select boardinghouse in Washington, D.C. The men who called the meeting were northern Whigs, and the men who came to it entered the elegant room as members of a variety of political parties, but they all left committed to a new northern organization that would stand against the spread of slavery into the West. They called themselves “Republicans,” hoping to invoke Thomas Jefferson—who had called his own political party Republican—and recall the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
When the House passed the bill on May 22 and Pierce signed it on May 30, the anti-Nebraska movement took off. Conventions across the North called upon all free men to fight together “for the first principles of Republican Government and against the schemes of aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased.” There were 142 northern seats in the House of Representatives; in the midterm elections that year, voters put “anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. Anti-Nebraska coalitions elected 11 senators and swept Democrats out of state legislatures across the North.
In 1855, Pierce insisted that Americans opposing the spread of human enslavement were trying to overturn American traditions, insisting that the United States was a white man’s republic and that the Founders had intended to create a hierarchy of races.
But those coming together to oppose enslavement denounced Pierce’s recasting of American history as “False all through!” As for the Founders, Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill wrote, “their ‘one guiding thought,’ as they themselves proclaimed it, was the inalienable right of ALL men to Freedom, as a principle.”
When Democrats tried to call those coming together as Republicans “radicals,” rising politician Abraham Lincoln turned the tables by standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. “[Y]ou say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort,” he said, addressing the Democrats who remained determined to base the United States in enslavement.
“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’; while you with one accord…spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new…. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated.”
When voters elected Lincoln president, the fledgling Republican Party turned away from a government that catered to an oligarchy trying to overturn democracy and instead reinvented the American government to create a new, active government that guaranteed to poorer men the right to be treated equally before the law, the right to a say in their government, and access to resources that had previously been monopolized by the wealthy.
The present looks much like that earlier moment when people of all different political backgrounds came together to defend the principles of the United States. In today’s moment, when someone like J.D. Vance backer billionaire Peter Thiel says, “Democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted,” and the Republicans’ Project 2025 calls for replacing democracy with Christian nationalism, it makes sense for all people who care about our history and our democratic heritage to pull together.
Today, Olivia Troye, who served on national security issues in the Trump White House, said, “[W]hat is happening here with the Republican Party… is dangerous and extreme. And I think we need to get back to the values of…observing the rule of law, of standing with our international allies and actually providing true leadership to the world, which is something that Kamala Harris has exhibited during the Biden Administration.”
As Lincoln recalled, when people in his era realized that the very nature of America was under attack, they “rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We…are rapidly closing in…. “ And, he said, “When the storm shall be past,” opponents “shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Indeed, when the storm passed in his day, Americans found that the magnitude of the crisis they had weathered, and the rise of entirely new issues meant that old party lines had fallen apart and people reorganized along entirely new ones. Famously, Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who in 1860 had worked for the election of extremist Democrat John C. Breckinridge, stood heartbroken by Lincoln’s bedside as he breathed his last and blessed him, saying: “Now he belongs to the ages.”
George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, Virginia, 1857), pp. 353–354.
George Fitzhugh, Sociology For The South Or The Failure of Free Society, (Richmond, Virginia: 1854), pp. x–xi.
Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1856, p. 2.
James Henry Hammond to Thomas Clarkson, Esq, January 28, 1845, in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Honorable James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow & Co., printers, 1866).
Gaillard Hunt, Israel, Elihu, and Cadwallader Washburn: A Chapter in American Biography (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1925).
Abraham Lincoln, Address at Cooper Institute, New York City, February 27, 1860, in Basler, Collected Works, 3:522–550.
Comments Off on Politicians: victims of their own ineptitude!
Apparently, the political class has fallen into disarray along with their seemingly inability to do the simple job of legislating instead of “gotcha” politics. Some of us are relishing the hyperbole and vitriol while missing the point that no rational or reasonable legislation is being offered or proposed. This is not them against us, it is the elite’s will being done by legislators we (the people) elected to do our (the people’s) work. Promises made, promises broken always no matter what is said on the stump. party designations are no more than identification for voting purposes, what we (the people) need to heed are the words and deeds along with the effects on our lives.
Comments Off on Rogue court following rogue “former guy”?
Apparently, the high court is as corruptible as “the former guy” and so much of the GOP/ Dems The modern-day politics have become more of a “knee jerk” war rather than a movement to inform voters on the candidates. Remember the High court opened the door for “dark money”, so no surprise in recent revelations and rulings.
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