Slight of Hand and Wires and Mirrors; No Accountability
Our leader announced a speech to the nation, which turned out to be nothing but repeats of “Truth” social posts and comments previously made. A boring, disjointed 19 minutes of nothing credible. Credibility is stating a mission and following through. Chaos is changing the mission and its achievements every ten minutes or so. If you don’t believe me, watch the stock market.
Meanwhile, behind the curtain, The Great Oz and his handlers are changing how our democracy operates. The failed military officer, Pete Hegseth is examining and removing African Americans, females, and especially African American Females from promotion lists. He is firing the top general who questions his judgement in toying with a time honored system where the military chooses its leaders based on performance and leadership abilities, not their gender nor their color.
Does Hegseth understand demographics? Does he understand that military recruitment is problematic these days days, that the pool of recruits has shrunk dramatically? Does he understand that brawn no longer wins wars, but fighter planes, drones, new ideas and weapon development are fighting a new kind of war, where every gender and color contributes the the nuances of creative strategies available to a commander in chief who genuinely understands how to function in the fog of war?
Today Heather Cox Richardson alerts us to another slight of hand, the kind of small change the controllers hope will go unnoticed: The challenge of ACCOUNTABILITY and how it impedes a sitting President. She quotes the following, and it quite takes my breath away:
Yesterday Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, of the Office of Legal Counsel, published an opinion for the White House that claims the Presidential Records Act, which requires that presidents keep records of their official business and turn them over at the end of their term, is unconstitutional. Gaiser clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
“The PRA is not a valid exercise of Congress’s Article I authority and unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President guaranteed by Article II. The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the Presidency untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose,” the memo reads. “For these reasons, the PRA is unconstitutional, and the President need not further comply with its dictates.”
(taking a moment to catch my breath)
We burden our elected president with the requirement that we know what he does and why he is doing it?
How can anyone believe this lunacy? Any person in a position of responsibility has to answer to his polity! Elected politicians all the more. He answers to us, the voters.
Our leader has a lot to answer for. We can’t trust anything he says, from minute to minute. Our treasury has been declared insolvent. He is sending our children off to war with unclear orders and insufficient leadership.
He has hired a confederacy of ignorant, greedy sycophants. He has gutted our diplomatic service. He has gutted Consumer Oversight. He has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency. He has corrupted the Department of Education.
He is terrified he cannot win and is attempting to take over national elections. Meanwhile, he is bankrupting our country with garish monuments and wars we never agreed to fight.
He is subjecting women to outdated standards and taken away their rights to make decisions for their own bodies.
He is corrupting our social system, taking medical care away from those who need it most, and callously neglecting the veterans who have served our country so loyally.
He has made agreements with other countries that we only learn about by accidental comments.
This can’t go on. Accountability. Oversight. Congressional Approval. Fair and Free Elections. Constitutional Restraints!
Today in the Strait of Hormuz
When you treat your friends badly and no one comes to help you when you screw up:
Even Fox News?
From Robert Reich’s post of March 29, Trump’s ratings continue to tank. The relevance? Most presidents get a bump with a war, people tend to back their leader. Then again, when most country leaders start a war, they consult with allies, and give their population a clue about what is about to happen and why. Failing to do that results in lack of enthusiasm by former friends, treated rudely, and a population treated as irrelevant to the needs and goals of the leader.
Meanwhile, Trump’s polls continue to tank. In the new Reuters/Ipsos poll, only 36 percent approve of his performance while 62 percent disapprove, a new record low for Trump. In the latest Quinnipiac poll, 38 percent approve of him; 56 percent disapprove. Even the latest Fox News poll shows Trump approval at only 41 percent; disapproval at 59 percent; and fully 58 percent of Americans opposing U.S. military action in Iran.
Oscar Romero, Patron Saint of The Americas and El Salvador
My friends, when you hear that the immigrants seeking a new life in our country are rapists, thieves, the mentally ill and very bad people, please think of Oscar Romero, and all those who have fought the evil forces of thuggery and dictatorship to find a life of freedom for themselves, and for their families, especially, hope for their children.
I urge you to read a much criticized book, American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins. Here is what Wikipedia says. My experience was that the struggles exposed in American Dirt are very typical of people seeking to escape the violence of their societies.
American Dirt is a 2020 novel by American author Jeanine Cummins, published by Flatiron Books. The book is about a Mexican bookseller who is forced to flee as an undocumented immigrant to the United States, along with her son, after her journalist husband exposes a local drug kingpin.
ÓSCAR ROMERO
ARCHBISHOP OF SAN SALVADOR, AND THE MARTYRS OF EL SALVADOR
(24 March 1980)
Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (August 15, 1917 – March 24, 1980), commonly known as Monseñor Romero, was a priest of the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador. He later became prelate archbishop of San Salvador.
As an archbishop, he witnessed numerous violations of human rights and began a ministry speaking out on behalf of the poor and victims of the country’s civil war. His brand of political activism was denounced by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the government of El Salvador. In 1980, he was assassinated by gunshot while consecrating the Eucharist during mass. His death finally provoked international outcry for human rights reform in El Salvador.
In 1997, a cause for beatification and canonization into sainthood was opened for Romero and Pope John Paul II bestowed upon him the title of Servant of God. Pope Francis canonized Romero as a saint on 14 October 2018. He is considered the unofficial patron saint of the Americas and El Salvador and is often referred to as “San Romero” in El Salvador. Outside of Catholicism Romero is honored by other religious denominations of Christendom, like the Church of England through its Common Worship. He is one of the ten 20th-century martyrs from across the world who are depicted in statues above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey, London.
from Wikipedia
Also commemorated on this day are three Maryknoll nuns and a woman lay missionary killed by a Salvadoran army death squad on 2 Dec, 1980, and additionally six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter, who were also murdered by the Salvadoran army on 16 Nov. 1989.
Eid Mubarak 2026
May Allah bless you greatly on this great holiday, may you join with family and may you have peace and love in your hearts.
I give thanks for all the kindness you have shown me through the years, and for how you have helped me understand some of the nuances of the beliefs we share. We have more in common than we have differences.
Prayer for the Feast Day of Saint Cuthbert
From today’s Lectionary readings:
Merciful God, who called Cuthbert from following the flock to be a shepherd of your people: Mercifully grant that we also may go without fear to dangerous and remote places, to seek the indifferent and the lost; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
“I Have No Need of You”
From this morning’s Lectionary Readings:
1 Corinthians 12:12-26
12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.13For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15If the foot were to say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16And if the ear were to say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?
18But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20As it is, there are many members, yet one body. 2
1The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ 22On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; 24whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, 25that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. 26If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.
Of Little or No Interest to Most People
I began this blog in 2006, living in Kuwait. Kuwait was resource-rich for blogging; lots of bloggers, all kinds of interests; as a new resident in Kuwait, it gave me a portal into a new world, a new way of seeing things, and a way to meet wonderful people I might otherwise have never encountered. Kuwait was also rich in ex-pats, people from all over the world came to Kuwait to work, to send money home to their families, to create a better life. Many of those stories are in previous entries.
One story in particular still makes me laugh. I was at a dinner party at the British Embassy, seated next to a Nigerian woman. “So how did you come to live in Kuwait?” I asked, as I always do, because the answers are always so varied and unexpected.
She said she came to work with her husband. She leaned in and said in a low voice “I look deep inside you and tell you things you never knew about yourself.”
I’m pretty good at keeping a polite face, but I think I slipped a little then as I looked at this very respectable woman and thought “Witchcraft??” “Psychologist?” And she laughed, and said “I’m a radiologist.” We became good friends. I loved her sense of humor and her love of life.
There was a lot to write about, so many things that were new and unusual and often lovely. Before I left Kuwait, my blog had more than a million hits. Before I left Doha, I had more than two million. That was 16 years ago, and blogging has diminished, I no longer live such an exotic and interesting life and I have less time to write. The blog has struggled on.
This morning, I noticed I am about to hit 2,900,000 hits. Maybe this week. That’s fun for me. And it makes me wonder if I will live long enough, write long enough, to hit 3 million.
Hope is Not a Strategy
Our leader has said other nations will come to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump last week first raised the idea of naval escorts for tankers in the strait “if necessary,” but on Monday, he hoped they wouldn’t be needed.
“When the time comes the U.S. Navy and its partners will escort tankers through the strait if needed. I hope it’s not going to be needed, but if it’s needed, we’ll escort them right through,” he said.
But even with Naval escorts, an expensive and time-consuming mission, it’s “not necessarily a guaranteed success,” according to Kirby.
“Drones can fly low and slow, they can fly fast and low, and they can do a lot of damage even to one ship with the Navy not being able to knock it out of the sky,” he said. (From TheHill.com)
And then this, from Associated Press:
“Many Countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait, will be sending War Ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe,” Trump wrote on Saturday, later adding, “this should have always been a team effort.”
It was not clear if that multi-nation push was set to begin or if Trump only hoped it might, however. That’s because he also wrote: “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected” will “send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer” be threatened by Iran.
The normal route for declaring war is to communicate your intentions to your allies before you attack. It is to prepare and coordinate with your own national institutes before you attack. And, when you are going to seek assistance, it is a really good thing if you have not insulted your allies in numerous ways before asking for their help, especially when it involves great risking expensive ships, aircraft and lives.
“Hope” and “Hopefully” are not good substitutes for steady, consistent diplomatic relations and providing reliable, honorable leadership on the international level. This would-be war eagle has soiled his nest.
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