9/5/2026

 Saturday, September 5, 2026

1906 Saint Louis U. quarterback threw the first legal forward pass in the history of American football for a TD at Carroll College, Waukesha, Wisconsin

1938/1939. Jimmy Cummings born to Scotty Cummings and Monica Clausen Cummings

1960 Cassius Clay [Muhammad Ali] beat the 3-time European champion Zbigniew Pietrzykowski to win the Olympic light heavyweight boxing gold medal at the Rome Games

1972 Eleven Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later killed by the Palestinian Black September group at the Munich Olympics

1922 Jimmy Aquavia moved to Alexandria

2023 Former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol

2025: The Trump administration deployed ten F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to take part in military action against drug cartels in Venezuela and Latin America. 

In bed at 9, up at 5:45; 0600 205.0  127/77/58, 0612 124/71/58;  69/75/66, haze, mostly cloudy day ahead.  

Morning meds at 8:20 a.m.  Entresto at 6:45 a.m. and p.m.

 I'm grateful for my wife, who gives me a reason to live each day.  We have partnered for 40 years, the last half of our lives.  Just from watching he, she gives me daily lessons on how to live.  While I tend to live in the past and to fear the future, she lives each day as it comes, each moment.  While I tend to keep a distance from other people, even friends, she forms friendships easily, and no day goes by without her talking on the phone and chatting in the yard or on the street with one or more of her friends. The older and the more hobbled I get, the more I depend on her, and the more she carries the load of keeping us going.  I am a lucky guy, make that a very lucky guy.  I wrote and read a tribute to her for her 80th birthday dinner that I will post here if I can find it, which, so this morning I have been unable to do.

Vengeance, Trump Moves to Strip Tax Exemption from Schools that Aid Minority Students.  From the NYTimes 2 days ago:

The Trump administration released new rules that could revoke tax-exempt status from any school offering targeted support to Black or other minority students, a sweeping change that opens another front in the president’s campaign to reshape American education.

The proposed regulations, which the Treasury Department published on Thursday, would add another element to the guidelines schools and other organizations must follow to qualify for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. The rules would deny tax-exempt status to any school, including secondary schools and universities, if it has any policy or program, including admissions and scholarships, that the I.R.S. finds to be racially discriminatory.

Such a change would thrust the I.R.S. into the center of the Trump administration’s effort to pressure schools to abandon initiatives aimed at supporting Black and other minority students. Trump officials view such programs as a form of discrimination against white and Asian Americans, and federal civil rights lawyers have opened investigations on those grounds into admissions policies at Harvard, Yale and other schools.

Proving again the bitter truth in an old cynical adage: no good deed goes unpunished, especailly in Trump's Republican America.

Peggy Noonan's weekly column in the Wall Street Jouranl is titled "25 Years of Thinking About 9/11."  She concludes "I’ll never get over it, none of us will."  She's right, at least for those of us old enought to remember it.  I had just turned 60, and was visiting my Dad in Florida, washing his windows, sharing meals, and going to the VFW where he had paid for my life membership, where hs name was on a wall plaque with other WWII vets, and mine with other Vietnam vits.  We were watching the Today Show on NBC with Katie Couric,Matt Lauer, and later Tom Brokaw.  Lauer interrupted another story to announce a terrible accident at  about 8:51, but then came the news of the second collision a few minutes after 9.  By 10, the South Tower collapsed, and about half an hour later, the North Tower collapsed.  My Dad and I watched most of it live, all except the initial flight into the North Tower.    I don't remember that we talked about it, or whether we were too stunned.  We say 'life turns on a dime' and it did that day.  It triggered the start of the government's "War on Terror," with all of its terrible and illegal excesss.  It led to our 'forever wars' in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It led to the deepening of divisions among Americans, not over the horror and wrongfulness of what had happened, but over the government excesses that it led to. CIA torture, reditions, domestic spying.  It set the stage for the world we live in today. 

In these pages, I've often compared where we are now with the terrible 60s and early 70s, when Johnson and Nixon led the government.  I always opine that that earlier tumultuous time was a much better time because, as a nation and a govenrment, we were on our way up.  The civil rights acts of the  60s, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start, Food Stamps, and many other programs under Johnson, and the creation of OSHA, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Environmental Protection Act, and Social Security COLAS under Nixon.   The Nixon administration even pursued, unsuccessfully, a national health insurance program.  Today of course Richard Nixon would be called a RINO, despite or because so much good legislation and good social safety net programs were initiated or expanded under his administration.  Compare that to where we are now, with a radical, even criminal, administration hell-bent on destroying much of the good that has been accomplished between the FDR administration and the coming of the Reagan Revolution.  Even Reagan strengthened social security and oversaw the passage of a major Immigration Reform Act that provided citizenship to millions of undocumented residents.  Again, compare that to where we are now.  Is there a causal thread (or rope) between 9/11 and where we are now.  I believe there is.