CORRUPTION IN PLAIN SIGHT

 

THE SENATE RACE IN TEXAS IS GETTING INTERESTING

 

Convicted felon, Donald Trump, proudly endorsed indicted felon, Ken Paxton for Texas Senate.

(Again, can anyone imagine if former President Obama had been involved in this shameful situation? This is why so many Americans label this disgrace as "White Privilege." Why do these two people get a pass, when we absolutely know Conservatives would be in paroxysms of fury if Mr. Obama did this?)

Ken Paxton beat long-time Republican Senator John Cornyn after Trump endorsed Paxton in Texas's recent primary.

And why not?

Paxton is the perfect embodiment of what the once proud Republican Party has become with Trump as its leader:

Venal and unprincipled.

(As well as a refuge for antisemites, xenophobic isolationists, Nazis, white nationalists, and extreme fundamentalist Christians who do not believe in the separation of their religion and government, as is set out in the US Constitution. Have I left anything out?)

Hmmm. Decisions, decisions.  Which way will the good people of Texas vote with these two men?

Stay tuned.

Oh, and there's this disgusting leniency Paxton gifted to a convicted pedophile after he, Adam Hoffman, was found guilty of sexually assaulting a young boy:

"A convicted child sexual abuser who received leniency from Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office was released after just 30 days in a McLennan County jail, KWTX reported. 

Former Waco attorney Adam Hoffman walked free on good behavior halfway through his 60-day sentence for sexually abusing a child, according to the outlet. 

Hoffman’s case sparked bipartisan criticism of Paxton after prosecutors in his office allowed the abuser to plead down his charges following a deadlocked jury and the victim’s unwillingness to testify again." --Daily Caller

At this point, why would anyone, in good conscience, want to be associated with the Republican Party?

Trump threatened to blow up a US ally in today’s wild cabinet meeting.

 

Just another day in the Trump circus that's pretending to be the US government. His enablers will shrug this off as "Trump being Trump," when in fact they should be talking about invoking the 25th Amendment.

Trump is clearly insane.

“Oman will behave just like everybody else or we'll have to blow them up. They understand that. They'll be fine,” Trump added. 

It is unclear whether the President misspoke or why he would threaten to attack a Middle Eastern partner.

The  Daily Mail has contacted the White House for comment. The Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries one-fifth of the world's oil, has been shut since Iran closed it after US and Israeli airstrikes in late February. 

The strait's reopening remains a key sticking point in peace talks. Oman has a history of serving as a friendly mediator between the White House and the Iranian regime. 

The country helped broker the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal and has acted as a US defense partner in the Middle East since 1980.” Excerpt From “Trump threatens to BOMB US ally sparking confusion in wild Cabinet meeting” —Daily Mail

GUEST POST BY DAVE MILLER

 

Questions, questions, questions...

Since Grey One talks sass likes questionnaires, here’s another five.

Again, as before, five simple answers is the cost of discussion admission.

1. Should the US be paying money to people found guilty or who have pleaded guilty to beating US Police Officers and defacing the US Capitol on Jan 6?

2. Is it unpatriotic and/or un-American for people in the US and Congress to push back against a president’s agenda?

3. If a politician votes with his or her party over 90% of the time, should that party attack that person for disloyalty? I’m thinking Rep Massie and Sen Fetterman here.

4. Should the US government provide an official US Federal Voter ID card to all citizens of our country on their 18th birthday, free of charge and demand use of that card as the single, mandatory ID to vote in our country?

5. Would you support a 20 year term limit for justices of the Supreme Court?

My answers?

No.
No.
No.
Yes.
Yes.

Yours?

BTW... I'm beside myself these days. Why are building warehouses in the US to house hundreds of thousands of immigrants? Are we going to put them there? How much worse politically can the Iran War go? $1.7 billion!!!??? A president tweeting AI photos of himself with aliens, as a super hero and more all night long? A Sec Def openly campaigning against a Republican for wanting to support Ukraine and believes the Epstein files need to be released as per the law the president himself signed?

JUST PUTTING THIS OUT THERE:

 

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

MEMORIAL DAY 2026

 

 I usually post a photo of one of my favorite sculptures in Boston, The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, which is installed across the street from the Massachusetts State House, on the Boston Common.

"Commissioned from the celebrated American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the early 1880s and dedicated as a monument in 1897, the Shaw Memorial has been acclaimed as the greatest American sculpture of the nineteenth century.

The relief masterfully depicts Colonel Shaw and the first African American infantry unit from the North to fight for the Union during the Civil War. The sculpture combines the real and allegorical, and presents a balance of restraint and vitality."

I also include, with the post, Robert Lowell's moving poem about the Shaw Memorial in which Lowell ties in the yet unresolved issues of the Civil War with the mindless consumerism that grips the nation in his poem “For the Union Dead”.  It is one of my favorite poems; and when I visit the Shaw Memorial, as I often do, I think of Lowell's poem that so perfectly limns the relief and its setting in the Boston Common.


"One of Lowell’s best-known works, Union Dead is a multi-layered poem set in the heart of Boston. On the surface, it is an elegy to the heroic Massachusetts 54. The soldiers fought with valor and moral integrity while trying to preserve the Union and end slavery. A closer examination reveals a country that blindly worships Capitalism. Following consumerism alone has left the country directionless. Lowell watches the steam shovels atwork and comments that avarice is literally and figuratively shaking the Massachusetts Statehouse, “Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse.” Lowell is nostalgic for the Boston of his youth and for a country, real or imagined, whose moral integrity was intact. Lowell is raising an objection to a country that commodifies the nuclear age, he objects to the new realism; he objects to the triumph of
commercialism over morality, he objects to a country that has forsaken spirituality for physicality:“On Boylston Street a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler safe, the “Rock of Ages” that survived the blast. Space is nearer.”  

The space that Lowell speaks of is just that--Nothingness. Extinction of the human race will be the cost if we cannot move to higher moral ground."

FOR THE UNION DEAD

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is a lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic

The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns…

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

                                    --Robert Lowell


On the Boston Common: 

Over 200 volunteers spent Wednesday planting flags for Memorial Day on the grounds of Boston Common in downtown Boston in honor of those who served and died for our country. 

The flags represent all of the fallen soldiers from Massachusetts who have died since the civil war.

Peace.