3/27/2025

Thursday, March 27, 2025

D+141/67

1863 American Confederate President Jefferson Davis called for a day of fasting & praye

2019 US Special Council Robert S. Mueller wrote a letter to US Attorney William Barr regarding Barr's summary of the Mueller Report stating Barr's letter "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the findings. "There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations."

In bed at 10  half awake at 5:05, and up at 6.  37°, wind chill 29°, high of 52°, cloudy   

Prednisone, day 341; 3 mg., day 1/21; Kevzara, day 9/14; CGM, day 9/15; Trulicity, day 6/7.  2 mg. of prednisone at 6:20 a.m. and 1 mg. at 6:55 p.m.  Other meds at noon.

MLB's Opening Day and a telling comment by Mike Barnacle on Morning Joe: "The point about major league baseball and opening day is is the word 'hope,' 'hopeful.'  We've never needed baseball more than we need baseball today because baseball is an everyday proposition.  It gives you someplace to vent - your anger, your hopes, your dreams,  It gives you a chance to realize that failure is an option because you don't win every game.  And it takes your mind off the things that we talk about here every day which is so deeply depressing."

The program's first 10 minutes were devoted to blather and banter about the upcoming season and I paid little attention, but just before they turned to the news of the day, they guessed who would win the World Series and David Ignatius said he had to pick the Red Sox because his mother was a true blue Red Sox fan till the day she died at age 94.  It reminded me of my mother and her devotion to the White Sox.  I remember her listening on the radio to Jack Brickhouse announcing the games while she irioned her uniform for her work as a waitress.  Are these tears welling up in my eyes as I remember her , or is it the eye drops I put in earlier?  My memories are of her in that dingy, roachy, 3 room, basement apartment, with Kitty and me and my miserable, war-wrecked  Dad, the worse living quarters in the neighborhood, and our family the most notorious because of Hartman's crime against us, but Mama's delighting in the successes of Billy Pierce, and Sherm Lollar and Chico Carasquel and Luis Aparicio and Minnie Minoso and lamenting their failures.  I hope and wish that there really is a Mormon Heaven and that Mom and Dad, and Kitty and Jim and Uncle Jim and Aunt Monica are all up there, happy together, waiting for me.  

The faded, B&W photo is of my mother wearing the Italian peasant outfit she was required to wear when she worked at Louis George Restaurant.  It was that blouse with the puffy sleeves that I recall her ironing in our little kitchen while listening to White Sox games.

Is it crazy to believe that Elon Musk has bought the US government and that Donald Trump sold it to him?  The 25% tariffs on vehicles and vehicle parts that Trump announced yesterday has stunned both our domestic automakers and our long-term allies that also make vehicles for the American consumers, i.e., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Japan, and South Korea.  The one carmaker that may benefit, however, is Tesla, owned by Elon Musk.  Tesla makes all the cars it sells in the U.S. in California and Texas and will not be subject to Trump's tariffs. 

I had a VA visit with Deena this afternoon to check on my swollen lower legs, feet, and ankles.  It was routine.

Are we becoming/Have we become a police state?  Wikipedia:

A police state describes a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are typically one-party states and dominant-party states, but police-state-level control may emerge in multi-party systems as well.

I wondered about our status as a police state as I watched a video of a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University,  Rumeysa Ozturk, being arrested by a team of blacked-garbed, mostly masked, plain-clothes ICE agents before being whisked off to a detention center in Louisiana.  I rhink also of Trump's attacks on "Big Law" and on the national news media (ABC, CBS) and local media (Des Moines Register),