1029

 Saturday, October 29, 2022

In bed at 10, awake at 5:00, out of bed at 5:10, 4 or 4 pss, 2 glasses of red.  Much better night than the night before.  32 degrees outside but I went outside with Lilly in just my nightshirt and it didn't seem so cold.  No wind, I guess.

A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting

Geri's dear friend Fredi Miller, her longtime on-the-road roommate on recruitment trips, mentioned to her in a text or email a documentary on HBO on the Tree of Life shooting.  We watched it last night.  Heartbreaking, sobering.  Its 4th anniversary was 2 days ago.  Fredi and her husband live in the same Squirrel Hill neighborhood where Tree of Life is located, though they are not members of the synagogue and were snowbirding in Florida when the murders occurred.  There has been a tremendous increase in anti-semitic incidents since Trump became president, part of the surge of right-wing extremism.  Not unrelated to the following

Obama in Milwaukee: and they wonder why . . .

Barack Obama appears in Milwaukee today for a big rally for Tony Evers, Mandela Barnes, and other Democrats.  The rally is at North Division High School, at 10th and Center Streets, in the heart of Milwaukee's Black ghetto, zip code 53206,   It is a high crime area where, according to a 2015 article in Milwaukee Magazine, only 37% of adult males are employed and the poverty rate for children is 66%. "Leaving aside the loss of family-supporting manufacturing jobs, consider: There are no public libraries in 53206. No major parks. No Walmart, Kohl’s, Home Depot, or Ace Hardware. No prominent restaurants, not even a McDonald’s, Wendy’s, or Burger King. No Jewel-Osco, Sentry, Aldi or Pick ’n Save, with only a small Lena’s grocery off Fond du Lac and Meinecke. Child care centers, which have a median hourly wage of $8.64, are the fastest-growing business."  About 2/3rds of the families in 53206 are single-parent families with the parent being female.  Why hold the Obama/Evers/Barnes rally at North Division?  Why not, e.g., South Division? Fiserv Forum? the Arena or Auditorium downtown?  Presumably to turn out Black voters for the midterm election because Black voters are an essential component of the Democratic 'base' and Black voters are notoriously no-shows at midterms.  Milwaukee Blacks turned out in droves for Obama, and supported Hillary and Biden, but will they report in numbers for Evers and Barnes?  Probably not, despite racial solidarity with Barnes.  So the rally is held in the heart of the impoverished, crime-ridden inner city supporting the notion that the Democrats are the party of minorities and liberal elites, unconcerned about 'ordinary white workers.'  And they wonder why they have lost so many white (and Hispanic) voters to the Republicans.

Not the only pessimist

In Maureen Dowd's op-ed this weekend, "The Pelosis and a Haunted America," her concluding sentence about the dystopia we are living in is "But a feral mood has taken hold.  If you think Washington is monstrous now, just wait."

The Worst Human Being?

Writer Ken Auletta recently said that the worst human being he ever profiled was Roy Cohn.  "Flawed?  He was beyond flawed. . . he was evil in some ways, but a brilliant lawyer. . . “Prospective clients who want to kill their husband, torture a business partner, break the government's legs, hire Roy Cohn,” Auletta wrote in his 1978 profile, “Don't Mess With Roy Cohn." “He is a legal executioner—the toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America.”

    This got me wondering who I consider to be 'the worst human being' and of course, I came up with Roy Cohn's client,  Donald John Trump.  Not Hitler? Not Putin?   Hitler and Putin at least were/are beset with notions of imperial grandeur of their countries.  It was the Fatherland and Mother Russia visions that impelled them.  With the Donald, it's all Donald, not really "America Great Again."  He'd sell America down the drain in a New York minute to Russia or Saudi Arabia if the deal were good for Donald.  He's a Christian Nationalist only to attract power and adulation from hordes of Christian nationalist fools who follow him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.