APOCOLYPSE, NOW

By Effey

I make no bones about it.  I am scared stiff of a President Trump, because having studied the signals which let us know who will turn into a dictator, I see Trump as the perfect candidate to become a Fascist Dictator.  And don't think it can not happen in America.  That was how Germans felt about their government and in the end Hitler destroyed all the Checks and Balances which the German Government did have.

I am not claiming, that Hillary Clinton is perfect, either.  Nobody is perfect.  But she has made one mistake which haunts her.  In hindsight she has fessed up to it and even apologized in a sincere genuine manner for the mistake.  Trump makes mistakes' every day and spouts lies every day sometimes as many as 37 lies in one speech. 

Dictators tell the people what they want to hear.  They make promises which they can not deliver.  In the end they destroy their countries.  Look at Hitler, Mussolini and Hugo Chavez, to name just a few.

And as much as James Comey of the FBI is known to be a man of integrity, even his former boss, US Attorney General Eric Holder, whom I also consider to be a man of integrity, has said that Mr. Comey has exceeded his authority, trying to protect himself.  You simply do not make a statement such as he made on Friday, eleven days before a General Presidential Election, simply because it could sway the end results of the election!

All this being said, I hope and pray, that we do not wind up with a President Donald Trump, but rather with Hillary.  Mistakes or not, she is still the best qualified candidate for the job.  She will not have an easy task, because the deck is stacked against her as it was against the most brilliant president this country ever had in modern times!

Tell your friends about this blog.  Forward it to them!

Stay tuned!

Red beans and Ricely yours,

Effey

HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOD

By Effey

Back in the 1930's Hollywood helped Americans get through the Great Depression by providing jobs for thousands of people as movie extras as well as dancers and singers by creating a diversion which gave Americans a brief respite from the daily, depressing news of the times.

Movies, such as "Gold Diggers of 1935" and "42nd Street" had a cast of hundreds in great dance routines choreographed by Busby Berkley with eye catching overhead shots of the dance routines.  The movies themselves had transparently simple plots, but great music, great dances, great costumes and both, men and women, had great appealing figures.  "Hollywood Hotel" (1937) was another one of those movies featuring the song "Hooray for Hollywood" which is performed as the overture to the Academy Award ceremonies to this very day.

This movie introduced a new concept to the genre, famous big bands, with famous musicians of the time and again simple transparent plots.

But then in the mid 1940's Hollywood grew up and tackled socio-psychological issues, like the "Best Years of our Lives" about the challenges facing war veterans returning home, or "They Were Expandable" about the frustrations the Navy faced as it was forced to hop from island to island to escape from the advancing Japanese.  Mrs. Miniver" was another significant war movie, dealing with the disruptions of life for an English middle class family living through the German Rocket Blitz over London and the rescue of trapped British Troops in Dunkirk.  "Gentlemen's Agreement" was the forerunner for movies dealing with racial or ethnic prejudices such as anti-Semitism and racism against African-Americans ("Imitation of Life").

But one movie in particular, rings true especially in these, our very challenging times: "The Caine Mutiny"  The film was based on the 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk, about a captain of a Navy destroyer (Captain Queeg) who accuses his crew of Mutiny at a time when he himself couldn't fulfill his responsibilities of the moment and refuses to accept responsibilities for his mistakes. 

The movie starred Van Johnson, Humphrey Bogart, Jose Ferrer, Fred MacMurray, Robert Francis and Jerry Paris. 

During a heavy typhoon the officers of the ship, in order to save the ship from sinking, take control of the ship and are faced with a court martial trial for mutiny.  When Captain Queeg finally gets to testify he distinctly shows symptoms of a paranoid, schizophrenic personality

The members of the court just sit there quietly and realize what is going on and that the crew acted responsibly and not foolishly.

The courtroom episode reminds me very much of what our country is going through right now.  We have challenges, lots of them.  But Donald Trump keeps on rambling and spouting lies that he is the only one who can "save" this country.  He hasn't got the foggiest ideas, real ideas, on why there is an "establishment" and a "system" and how they have evolved over time for various different reasons.  We know that in general terms both work!  Can they be improved?  Probably!  In fact, yes!  There is always room for improvement.  But he pretends to have all the answers.  But so far he has not given us one idea that would work.  His mantra is that only he can fix our problems.  He is enamored with himself and is both an egomaniac and a megalomaniac!

In fact, if you ever have a chance to rent the movie "The Great Dictator" starring Charlie Chaplin and Jack Oakley in the roles of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini you will see exactly why I accuse Donald Trump of being a demagogue or a latent dictator. 

If truth be told, the problems we face were not created by President Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  They were created by a Republican Congress which undermined the two wherever and whenever possible.  We need a democratic president and a democratic congress, so that the President can create whatever policies this country needs to get out of our gridlock which has paralyzed our country.  Only then will we be able to tackle our challenges.  Having a democratic president who is progressive and a congress which wants to stand still and freeze in time will not work.  It is time that Americans wake up and not accuse our President of having failed to move the country forward but put the blame where it really belongs, with our Republican Congress.

Nevertheless, I am glad that Trump tried to run for the office of the president!  Why?  Because inadvertently he exposed the Republicans, who even though they did not like Donald Trump, they did not do anything to stop him.  They found all kinds of excuses to excuse his rude behavior, his true character and the fact that he is one of the biggest crooks who ever ran for the office of President of this country.  They overlooked the fact that he cheated hundreds of workers out of their salaries, built his empire on the backs of the middle class, without paying Federal Income Taxes, and duping people into signing up for his Trump University which did nothing for them, except extol Trump's virtues and treating women like chattel!  In comparison look at President Barack Obama who is beyond reproach and has integrity and has moved the country forward despite the Congress!  And also look at Clinton who has worked for the people who had no one to represent their rights, all her life!  Nobody is perfect.  But some are more perfect than others and vice versa, some are less perfect than others.  Donald Trump is the least perfect of all.  He lives in the gutter.

Stay Tuned.

Red Beans and Ricely Yours

Effey

Trump, The Chump, who should be dumped.

By Effey

Trump, The Chump, who should be dumped, shows absolutely no sign of understanding foreign policy.  For example: when he talks about Iraq he keeps saying we should have taken the oil, before we left Iraq.  He does not seem to either remember how many American lives we lost in Iraq or how many more American lives it would have cost the United States to take the oil.  Is he completely off his rocker?!

He may be 70 years old, but he talks like a 3 year old.

As Tim Kaine, the democratic candidate for Vice-President has recently said, "Donald Trump is a one man wrecking crew."  And that is not a compliment!!!

Trump's attitude to women is that of a 7 year old.  No sign of sensitivity when it comes to others except when somebody says something derogatory about him.  Then he cries like a baby that those people weren't "nice" to him.

Some time ago, I wrote a blog, entitled "People who live in glass houses…"  This phrase did not originate with me.  It was written by Geoffrey Chaucer for his play "Troilus and Criseyde" in 1385,  In other words "don't be a hypocrite, you will pay dearly for such an act of violent behavior.  Now the stones are being hurled back at him and the barrage of stones are hurting him. 

I recently saw our current President Barack Obama having a town hall meeting with veterans.  I simply love hearing this man speak because he thinks about what he will say before he blurts out his thoughts.  And when he speaks he is sensitive to the issue being discussed.

Donald Trump constantly reminds me of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.  He says things which the people want to hear and he is constantly willing to abrogate agreements others made because he thinks he knows better.  Guess what!  Both of them, both Mussolini and Hitler, kept their promises.  They did what they had promised their masses they would do.  And the masses loved what they did, but then the masses had to pay the price for their adulation of these two leaders.  Millions of soldiers died in battle, and their countries were decimated by their enemies.  Mussolini realized what damage he had caused to his country and his fellow Italians.  So, he tried to escape to Switzerland but on the way he got caught by Italian partisans and was hung upside down from the roof of a gas station. 

Hitler also refused to listen to the advice of his generals and he wound up committing suicide in the Humboldt Bunker in Berlin.  When the Russians entered Berlin and found his dead body they immolated it with fire so there would be no trace left of him.

And look what happened to Muamar Gjaddafi of Libya not so long ago!  When his time of reckoning came the mobs beat him to death, even though he cried like a baby pleading for mercy. It was a horror show to watch.  When he was finally dead they buried him in an unknown place so nobody would be able to find his grave.

I am not claiming that the same fate will happen to Trump should he become our president (which I seriously doubt will ever happen).  But we, the people, will pay a high price for his actions.  It took America almost close to 400 years to recognize that African Americans are human beings, not chattel.  It took us a century to legislate that the African Americans have the same God give unalienable rights that Whites have.  When they bleed they hurt the same as others do. 

It took women almost a century to be given the same rights which men are given by the Constitution.  But no!  Donald Trump wants to go back in time and erase decades of progress.

Wake up America!  We need to move forward not backward.  The problems we have in America are in large part due to the Republicans who want time to stand still and care more about the very rich than the middle class.  Time doesn't stand still, it moves on.  If you stand still, you will be behind.  And we have lost in the last two decades largely, but not only, because of the Republican Party and their refusal to work with President Obama.  Instead they undermined all his attempts to make changes and policies to help the middle class and to make America better.  But instead they stifled him.  (As an example, just recently Congress overrode the President's veto for American citizens to sue Saudi Arabia).  So now the people who elected the Republicans are paying the price for their choices.  To elect Donald Trump will only add fuel to the fire which is already raging!

Stay tuned.

Red Beans and ricely yours,

Effey

P.S.  Pass this blog on to a friend.  This election will decide the future of this country for decades to come.  We need an experienced friend of the people in the White House, not Donald Trump who has stiffed hundreds, if not thousands of people and who will in the end hurt us more than he will help.

The Morning after the Night Before

By Effey

Last night we witnessed the most important political event in modern American Presidential History: the first debate of the 2016 campaign for President of the United States.  It was important in two respects.  It was the first time a woman is the nominee of her political party running against one of the biggest liars in all of recent history as well as the biggest showman and slick snake oil salesman since P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum (1810 –1891), Donald J. Trump.

Hillary Clinton swept the floor with The Don.  She goaded him and he fell for the bait and thereby unraveled his message losing in a big way.  His body language and his constant sniffles showed that he was visibly uncomfortable because he realized that he was losing against Hillary.  He also kept drinking water every few minutes.   Obviously his throat started to dry up.  This usually happens when a person gets scared or nervous.  Of course, in typical Trump fashion he claimed that he won the debate, contrary to what the viewers believed and what some straw polls, taken immediately after the debate, showed.  If Trump had a wooden nose like Pinocchio had it would stretch from New York to California.

Hillary got Donald really upset and made him very uncomfortable when she posed the question and supplied the answer at the same time why the Don would not release his tax returns.  She suggested something I myself have suggested in the past, namely that he probably did not pay any federal taxes at all, which he considered to be smart.

Personally, I find this offensive.  He is living off the taxes, we the little guys have to pay.  He claimed he did not like the government, yet he is profiting from the very government that gave him the opportunity to become wealthy.  He is mocking the hand which is feeding him.

I was really proud of Hillary.  She exposed him for what he really is, what the last republican candidate, the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney called "a phony and a fraud."

I used to have dark hair but when it looked like Hillary might lose the contest it turned white.  This morning, when I looked in the mirror, I saw it turning dark again.  My worries are over!

Kelley Anne Conway, his third and current campaign manager, better get paid off in full now, in the next couple of weeks, before she too gets stiffed by Donald!

P.T. Barnum once said "there is a sucker born every minute".  Trump' supporters still believe that he will rescue America and "make America great again".  Little do they realize that Donald is in this race for himself and no one else!  He wants to become President because he faces $650 million debt for his businesses and several potential lawsuits which could possibly put him in jail.  He has used $10 million dollars of campaign contributions to pay off some legal bills.  This, of course, is illegal and could possibly land him in jail.  Perhaps he believes that the Senate and the House of Representatives will again be in the majority and therefore will block any impeachment effort.  Of course he will always deny those allegations as he constantly does when confronted by the media about some irregularity.  He spins the allegations around by claiming that this is a good and smart business strategy.

Michael Bloomberg, the former independent mayor of New York said it best at the Democratic National Convention when he said "I am from New York.  And I know a con man when I see one!"

If Trump ever becomes president, it will be the darkest day in American History, because he will destroy the country and blame everybody else, except himself.  He has all the characteristics of a dictator.

Stay tuned.

Red beans and ricely yours.

Effey

9/11-The Day Which Changed America

By Effey

Once again we commemorated 9/11.  Once again we were reminded of how 9/11 transformed our lives.

We have quite a number of other occasions too, which we should commemorate, because thousands of Americans lost their lives on those occasions, December 7th, 1941, the day Japan attacked the United States Fleet at Pearl Harbor and triggered the second war of the 1940's, the Pacific War.

D-Day, June 6, 1944, the day when we invaded Europe to fight Nazi Germany, which had conquered most of Western Europe and was even threatening the United States.  Thousands of our troops lost their lives on that day and even more came home crippled for life.

But how do we commemorate those events?  By having major stores having big sales on those days and families having picnics on those days! 

Somewhere there is something wrong with this form of commemoration!  These anniversaries are not joyous occasions!  They are sad and somber days, which affected millions of American and their families.  Don't we owe more to the many who lost their lives in those battles?

And yes, there is also the Holocaust which cost 10 million victims to lose their lives.  It was not just the genocide of Jews.  It also affected disabled and chronically ill people.  It affected people who spoke out against the events of the time and millions more.

In Israel the government created a special Day of Remembrance, called "Yom HaShoah", which is the day the concentration camps of Germany were liberated.  On Yom HaShoah at 12 noon all sirens wail throughout Israel, traffic comes to a halt for one minute, people get out of their vehicles and stand in silence next to their vehicles.

In Germany many people wear black clothes and go to the cemeteries to put flowers on the graves of what seem to be the graves of soldiers (not necessarily their relatives). 

Is it asking too much to commemorate the lives of those who fought and died for our freedom in a more somber way than having picnics and sales?  Are we really that jaded?

"Recently I Heard That Trump Made a Deal…."

By Effey

"Recently I heard from someone who knows someone who works for Trump that Trump made a deal with his friend Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, to hack the DNC and the Whitehouse". 

"Don't ask me where I heard this!"

"Just trust me.  I heard it from someone very close to Donald Trump."

"It's really a disgrace!"  "Disgusting!"

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the biggest liar of them all?

Did you know that Donald Trumps businesses are $650 million in Debt.  Look it up in the New York Times.  "Trust me!"

"And did you also know that New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie for gave Donald $25 Million in Taxes which he owed the State of New Jersey when he bankrupted his Casino in New Jersey!"  "That was Pay for Play".  "Disgusting!"

How can a Casino go bankrupt when all they have to do is raise the odds on gambling?  Only a business expert who has no scruples and is used to cheating people out of their money can do something like this,  Actually I would call this expert a cheat, which is even worse than being a liar!

Did you know that Don's wife was originally an illegal immigrant to the United States?  I read it in the New York Post!

Imagine Melania being the First Lady.  This would be the first time a First Lady appeared on pictures in the nude.  It was all over the media.

Remember when John F. Kennedy was president?  One of the official pictures of him was in profile with his wife Jacqueline facing the camera.  It hung in every consulate and embassy overseas as well as in all Federal Buildings.  Now think of the Donald in profile and Melania facing the camera in the nude.  Wonderful!  What great PR this would be for the United States of America.  Imagine what the radical Islamists will make of this!  They are the ones who do not permit their wives to even show their faces.  In some sects the wives have to walk two steps behind their husbands!

Having fun, yet?

Stay tuned.

What do you think of his bogus health report?  Since when do 

gastroenteritis give health status reports?  When doctors check certain criteria of a person's health, they send samples of their cultures to a lab.  If the sample doesn't show signs of something wrong it is considered negative.  If there are signs of some infection it is written up as positive.  So when this quack said that Donald's health is positive, he meant that there is something wrong with his health.  But to say that the Don is the healthiest Candidate ever can't be correct, because this Quack could never have examined all the other previous Presidents.  It sounds like Donald dictated to the doctor what to write.  And even worse!  The American Medical Association doesn't even know this quack.  He is not registered with the AMA and most probably is working without a license!  Maybe he too, is an illegal immigrant.

Having fun yet?

Stay tuned!

Red Beans and ricely yours.

Who Says G'd Doesn't Listen?

BY EFFEY

Newsmax reported the following today (8/3/2016). 

Breaking: RNC Thinks Trump May Drop Out

                                                                                                                                                                                    

           

RNC Thinks Trump May Drop Out, Considering Options
The Republican National Committee is weighing its options in the event Donald Trump drops out of the presidential race, ABC News' Jonathan Karl reported Wednesday.
"I am told senior officials at the party are actively exploring what would happen if Trump dropped out, how to replace him on the ballot," Karl said on "Good Morning America."
"The answer is they can't force him out. He would have to go out voluntarily then it would be the 168 members of the RNC through a complicated process that would pick a new candidate. It would have to happen by early September."
"This is absolutely unprecedented," Karl said. "I am told that RNC chairman Reince Priebus is furious — he has had multiple discussions with Trump telling him he needs to drastically change course. "
The RNC’s worries about Trump come after he continued to pummel the parents of the late Capt. Humayun Khan in media appearances. Khan, a naturalized citizen and a Muslim, died in 2007 during combat operations in Iraq.
Veterans groups, including the American Legion, the VFW, and the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA), have sharply rebuked Trump for continuing to criticize Khan’s Gold Star parents.
"Election year or not, the VFW will not tolerate anyone berating a Gold Star family member for exercising his or her right of speech or expression," Brian Duffy, leader of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said in a statement Monday.
The VVA called Trump’s continuing barrage against the Khans “disgraceful and un-American.”
Trump’s support among key Republican leaders across the nation is eroding.
NBC News reported that Priebus is "apoplectic" over Trump's comments Tuesday that he is not endorsing House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain in their re-election efforts. Both Ryan and McCain have endorsed Trump in his presidential bid.
According to NBC News, Priebus called Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort indicating his "extreme displeasure" with Trump.
MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" reported Wednesday that key Trump campaign staffers are "checking out" as the campaign flounders over the continuing controversy of Trump’s Khan comments.
Does this tell you something?
Red Beans and Ricely yours,

Effey