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The Republican Illness and its Cure - Rx
Those of us who
recognize the American voters' frequent willingness for a variety of reasons
to believe Republican lies should be preparing, at least mentally, and possibly otherwise, for what we will do if the unthinkable
happens in November, and meanwhile, working hard to make sure that it does not.
Rx: No
thinking American should vote for any Republican at any level whatsoever, from
school boards on up to the White House. The fact that they do not abandon the Republican label on
their candidacy should remind voters that they still belong to a party where right-wing extremists who live in
an alternate reality based on lies call the
shots.
JL
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More About Lies
And speaking of lies, Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director
in charge of counter-intelligence, sets out the facts about Trump’s lies concerning the few ‘documents’ that were found in the possession of
President Biden and former vice-president Pence, all of which were quickly
returned to where they belonged.
As it stands now, the DOJ’s case regarding the many documents Trump illegally
retained, hid at Mar-a-Lago, and for which he obstructed the FBI’s search for
many months, is being heard by a Trump-appointed judge in Florida whose
intention seems to be to permit delays well into the next decade.
Read the article (that appeared on MSNBC’s site) by copying and pasting this on your browser line:
or by CLICKING HERE.
(And speaking of Frank Figliuzzi, up until about a year or so ago, when
he was seen on MSNBC, the location from which he was speaking was obvious. Then, that was changed to a painted mountain
scene as the background. I wonder if
that was for security purposes. Try to
read ‘between the lines.’)
Among the litany of lies that pour from the mouth of Donald Trump, as
reported by David Leonhardt in the online New York Times’ ‘Morning’ on December
5 are “promising to use
the powers of the federal government to punish people he perceives to be his
critics and opponents, including the Biden family, district attorneys,
journalists and ‘the deep state.’ He has suggested that Mark Milley, a retired
top general, deserves the death penalty. Trump has called President Biden ‘an
enemy of the state’ and Nancy Pelosi ‘the Wicked Witch.’ He has accused former
President Barack Obama — ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ in Trump’s telling — of
directing Biden to admit ‘terrorists and terrorist sympathizers’ into the U.S.”
Could he be any clearer as to his intentions? And even
a magician cannot disassociate these warnings from the political party that
refuses to deny them and is likely to run this person for president again!
Finally, Former Republican Representative Liz Cheney's new book, ‘Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,’ just came out.
In it, she recounts what happened inside her own party in the weeks
before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the capitol following the 2020 presidential
election. Recently, speaking to an NPR reporter, Cheney warned that a second
Trump presidency threatens democracy and says the Republican party of today
does not represent her.
Her words: "If
the party goes down the path of nominating Donald Trump, certainly, the
party itself will have lost any claim to be a party that is, in fact,
supportive of the constitution."
So expelling
George Santos from the House of Representatives, a body in which he never
should have been seated in the first place, does not rid the Republican Party
of its major political tool … Lies!
If something comes out of the
mouth of a Republican, take it with the proverbial grain of salt (or even he
whole salt shaker) because it is likely to be just another lie. They are truly a legion of liars.
JL
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Assisted Living Not What it Should Be
The shortcomings of expensive privately owned assisted
living facilities were highlighted right here in recent postings on Jackspotpourri. The issue will not go away. People grow older with each passing day and
today’s medical advances keep them alive and relatively well far longer. Private long-term care insurance has failed
because the insurance industry’s actuaries never anticipated so many people
living such long lives.
Here’s another scary report from the New York
Times in the form of an opinion piece by David Leonhardt. Copy and paste https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/briefing/health-care.html
on your browser line, or JUST CLICK HERE. And pass it on to anyone over age 65 (and
their children) that you know!
Several possible answers to the questions raised by these articles include:
- making private profit-making assisted living available through Medicare (It is already available via Medicaid, but only available to those once its costs have impoverished them, and only if a facility willing to take lower Medicaid payments can be found),
- federal rather than State regulation and monitoring of these facilities,
- entirely removing ownership of such facilities from the investment marketplace, and
- providing financial incentives to replace such facilities with care in the homes of children or other relatives, where they historically have been.
… or a
combination of them.
JL
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The Israeli-Hamas War and Extremism
 |
| Hamas missiles being launched from Gaza City |
It is clear that the launching sites for the
missiles pictured above are in the middle of an urban area within the Gaza
Strip. It is unavoidable that
non-combatants will be killed so long as Hamas locates its launch sites, and
other military installations, in this manner, an attempt to avoid Israeli
attacks on them.
It amounts to their saying that Israel can
choose between the risk of not attacking such missile sites or doing so and
being blamed for killing non-combatant civilians. If Hamas launched missiles from Gaza’s
beaches, for example, the sites would be quickly destroyed by Israel bombing,
without civilian casualties. But having
Israel kill Palestinian civilians is part of Hamas’ plan.
Regardless of the outcome of the Israel-Hamas
war, Hamas must be destroyed. Its pledge
to eliminate the State of Israel makes that a necessity. Reported attempts by Hamas to target missiles
toward Israel’s nuclear facilities might explain the very aggressive and
thorough level of military activity by Israel’s forces within the Gaza Strip in
carrying out the necessary destruction of Hamas.
For humanitarian reasons, it is unfortunate
that the temporary pause in hostilities and the return of hostages is not
continuing, but as desirable as it was, the resumption of Israeli efforts to
destroy Hamas must continue in view of Hamas’ stated objective. A more permanent cease-fire, which these 'pauses' are steps toward, would amount to a Hamas victory because they ignore cease-fires anyway. One was in force on October 7.
While places to which non-combatant Gazans can
flee within Gaza are shrinking, the neighboring Muslim nations still refuse to
welcome them as refugees. This has always been their ‘non-solution,’ first refusing
refugees fleeing from the parts of Palestine lost in their unsuccessful war to
destroy Israel in 1967, and now from Gaza. These nations are not without blame.
Only with the destruction of
Hamas (or at least its complete, total, and permanent military degrading) will
Israel and the Palestinians then be able to work toward a peaceable two-state
solution. That is the great fear
of Palestinian extremists who want to wipe out the State of Israel, and of
Israeli extremists who insist that the State of Israel should encompass all of
Palestine, including ‘occupied territories’ beyond the existing borders of the
State of Israel.
I have made this point repeatedly in postings
on Jackspotpourri. It is up to both Israelis and Palestinians to
stop the extremists in their midst from determining their future.
We accomplished that in the United States In
1964, when an American presidential candidate (Barry Goldwater) praised
‘extremism’ by saying that ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no
vice.’ He was wrong and the voters turned him down in
an election rout, (he only received 38.5% of the popular vote), although many
Republicans today still believe those words.
Take my word for
it, right now, today, ‘extremism’ on either side in the Israel-Palestinian dispute
is indeed a vice, and one that can delay or even prevent a solution there.
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Email Alerts: If you
are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting
on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you
do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might
suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can
pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.
If you want to send someone the
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and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or
by providing a link to that address in your email to them. I
think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.
There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a comment from you. Each will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that you are now reading, but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography, or the 'sidebar' features such as access to the blog's archives.
Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
JL
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