Trump’s rocket strikes on alleged drug boats in the Western Caribbean and Eastern Pacific are his dream of what law enforcement should be. You make an allegation – look over there! A drug boat! You order up a Reaper drone armed with a Hellfire missile. You get your Secretary of Hair Gel to post a video on his X account showing the boat loaded down with packages – see what we said? Drugs! You shoot it out of the water. Boom! Lots of fire! It’s gone.

It’s not even shoot first, ask questions later, because there are no questions. It’s fait accompli. It’s gone.

I’ve watched every video they’ve posted of their attacks on so-called drug boats, and I’ve got to tell you, they’re not fishing boats. Nearly every one is the same design – a long speedboat style craft with three outboard engines attached to the transom. There are four or five thwarts, pieces of wood attached to the gunwales, running across the boat for stiffness, meaning that it is impossible to move around the boat without climbing over the thwarts. That’s not a fishing boat. It’s a boat designed to carry heavy loads in choppy seas without damaging the hull.

The boats are loaded with square or rectangular packages that appear to be wrapped in heavy plastic. Here is where it gets interesting. The boats are hit amidship by missiles fired from drones. Some of the packages explode away from the boats into the water. They can be seen floating next to the burning boat, because Hegseth’s videos dwell on the burning boats pridefully, like look what we did!

Do you want to know what those packages are? They’re evidence. But without defendants – the people in the boat, whose bodies exploded when hit by the missile – there is no need for the evidence.

There is also no need for the rest of the usual accoutrements of regular law enforcement, like some sort of an authority to make an arrest – say, the Coast Guard. There is no need for a prosecutor, because there is nobody to prosecute. There is no need for a courtroom or a judge, because there is no indictment, no case, no defendant. And there is no need for a defense attorney, because there is no one to defend.

Fifteen alleged drug boats have been sunk since the attacks began in September, killing 61 individuals whom Hegseth, speaking on X for the Trump administration, says were “narco-terrorists bringing drugs to our shores to poison Americans.”

But here is where it gets interesting. Three of these alleged “narco-terrorists” survived. Two were picked up by a U.S. naval vessel in the Caribbean Sea and “repatriated to their countries of origin for detention and prosecution,” according to the New York Times. One was rescued by Mexican authorities and taken ashore. We do not know his status.

Trump doesn’t want any survivors brought back to this country. Not one. They would get legal representation. Motions would be filed. The Trump administration would have to reveal the so-called “intelligence” Hegseth refers to in all his X posts, that the boat and the people on it are “known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics.”

Just between you and me, if our navy is picking up survivors from a burning boat…or two burning boats…they could also be picking up the drug packages that Hegseth’s own videos show floating around said burning boats and have the proof that Democrats on Capitol Hill have been demanding.

Today, members of the House Armed Services Committee were given a classified briefing about the “Trump administration’s military strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and the East Pacific,” according to a story this afternoon in The Hill. Rep. Jason Crow, Democrat from Colorado, sounded unconvinced and frustrated after the briefing, telling reporters, “Our job is to oversee the use of lethal force by our military outside of the United States, and I’m walking away without an understanding of how and why they’re making an assessment that the use of lethal force is adequate here. What I heard today was a tactical brief. I heard no strategy, no end game, no assessment of how they are going to end the flow of drugs into the United States, which needs to happen, by the way.”

Rep. Seth Moulton, Democrat from Massachusetts and a former Marine, told reporters that the members of the committee had questions about the legal justification for killing 61 individuals in international waters, but administration lawyers from the Department of Justice “cancelled at the last minute.” Committee Democrats asked Trump Defense Department officials about the legal aspects of the strikes on the alleged drug boats. “They just said that they can’t answer these questions because the lawyers aren’t here. They canceled having the lawyers here.”

There it is in a nutshell. They don’t have any legal justifications for these extra-judicial killings because there are none. Trump’s theory, or that of the people running the so-called drug boat shooting gallery show, is that they don’t need any legal justifications so long as there are no legal proceedings. With no defendants, there are no indictments, no trials, nothing. They just go out there in the Caribbean and the Pacific with their drones and shoot anything with three outboards on it.

Jason Crow put it well when he noted that stopping the flow of drugs into the United States “needs to happen, by the way.” But shooting random speedboats carrying packages wrapped in plastic is doing little to accomplish that goal, if in fact it is a goal of the Trump administration. Their failure to retrieve the plastic-wrapped packages and show that they contain dangerous drugs raises the question of exactly what the whole thing is about. Is it just a trigger-happy Trump and a trigger-happy Secretary of Hair Gel wanting to shoot stuff and watch it burn? Or is it part of another strategy that they’re not talking about?

What we might call the domestic equivalent of the drug-boat strikes would be police driving past a bank and observing masked men coming out of the bank carrying plastic bags that might, or might not, contain money. They get in a getaway car and drive. The police give chase, and without stopping the car and inspecting the bags to see if they contain stolen money, or arresting the suspects, they deliberately shoot at the getaway car. Its gas tank explodes, killing everyone inside.

The suspects are not questioned, because they are dead. There is no need for evidence, because there were no arrests. There is no trial because no one is indicted.

How likely do you think it is that such a thing would happen in this country, that police officers would kill everyone in a car fleeing from what appears to have been a crime scene, without stopping the car, arresting the suspects, and searching for evidence?

Well, how likely did you think it was that a Blackhawk helicopter would hover over an apartment building in Chicago, and armed, masked men would rappel down ropes to the roof of the building, and armed masked men would storm the building from every entrance, search every apartment in the building, without providing anyone with search warrants, detain all the residents in handcuffs, including toddler-age children, without reading them their rights, arrests dozens with outstanding warrants, and depart the scene with exactly one member of the alleged drug gang the masked federal agents were alleged to have been looking for?

We have a federal agency that is supposed to investigate drug smuggling and make arrests of drug smugglers. We have a federal waterborne force of defenders, the Coast Guard, that is charged with patrolling the coastal waters of the United States and stopping and inspecting boats in those waters and arresting people if drugs are found on board boats.

None of this is happening in the Eastern Caribbean or Western Pacific. Drones launched by the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Air Force are using military weapons such as Hellfire missiles to shoot at and sink boats alleged to be carrying drugs. Neither Secretary Dry Drunk nor the Attorney General nor the Secretary of Homeland Security has provided evidence that any law enforcement authorities at all have been involved in these extra-judicial killings.

This is what dictators do. They arrogate to themselves powers that are not specified in or authorized by laws. They use those powers to eliminate people whom they declare are “enemies” and justify it by alleging that they are “combatants” in a “war” on whatever they declare the war against.

Right now, it’s a war on drugs. The cartels are the enemy. The people on the alleged drug boats are the combatants. We already have soldiers from our army patrolling the streets of cities in this country. Democrats have been declared by Donald Trump, the President of the United States, to be “the enemy within.” He just accused a United States Senator, Chuck Schumer, who criticized his Asia trip as “a dud,” of using words that were “almost treasonous.”

They’re shooting boats out of the waters off the coast of South and Central America. How long before someone walking down an American street carrying a sign with an “almost treasonous” criticism of Donald Trump is shot without warning? Sixty-one people whom Trump declared are “enemies” of the United States are dead. This is not a drill.

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The Executive Education Academy Charter School of Allentown, PA, has just broken ground on plans for a $25 million stadium. The massive athletic complex will connect to the school and sit on top of a 300-stall parking garage and offer 4000 seats, a press box, and concessions. The field will be turf, be supported by concrete columns and sheer walls, and span 126,713 square feet. 

The complex will be near Coca-Cola Field, home of the minor league baseball team the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, with whom the charter will apparently share parking, the result of some protracted negotiations. The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission approved this thing. 

You are thinking, perhaps, that EEACS must be one hell of a school, and well, no, not really. According to Niche, the school rates a B-. Its test results are not great-- 36% proficiency for reading and 16% for math. Graduation rate is 95% (which tells us nothing about cohort attrition). There are 1,431 students K-12, and 100% of them are Free of Reduced Lunch students. According to School Digger, the student body is 5.4% White, 17.1 % Black, and 75.3% Hispanic. Allentown's population is 26% White, 8% Black and 60% Hispanic. 

Ironically, Niche says that girls and boys athletic participation is very low. Their football team plays AA ball and had a record of 6-5-1 this season. The Raptors also play AA basketball. 

In short, a pretty run of the mill charter school. Why do they need a $25 million stadium? That's not really clear. 

Some coverage notes that there are even more expensive and expansive stadiums out there at public schools, particularly in Texas and Georgia. Buford High School in Georgia just played its first games in the $62 million Phillip Beard Stadium.

But the Buford stadium came with controversy, with lots of observations about district priorities. But Buford's football team is ranked #9 nationally, and the stadium was actually paid for by the city. 

However, what we really want to notice about the Buford stadium is that the whole business involves decisions by locally-elected officials, both from the city and the school district. If people object to having their tax dollars spent this way, they can make their displeasure felt at the ballot box.

Not so for the EEACS stadium, because like any other charter school, EEACS is a privately owned and operated business-- it just happens to be funded by the local taxpayers, and if they don't like the idea of tax dollars funding a big beautiful stadium, well, too bad.

EEACS started operation in the fall of 2014, and lists four founders. Jennifer Mann, former Democratic state rep, now operating a consulting firm. She appears to have no current office with the school. Carol Trench, who appears to have worked with Philadelphia charter group ASPIRA and is now a Philly principal.

Steve Flavell is a co-founder and currently serves as Chief Operations Officer. Flavell has some actual background in education, but has worked mostly in behavioral health and as an administrator with Success Schools. He's paid around $150K. Robert Lysek is a co-founder who serves as CEO. Lysek appears to have started out with a career in law enforcement in mind (University of Florida), and was even a deputy sheriff in Pinellas County, FL. But he shifted to Camelot Education, founded Success Schools, and has been busy with PA charter schools for a while. 

Lysek was tagged for Pennsylvania's Superintendent's Academy in 2018, and he seems generally to be the public face of EEACS. He's paid just under $200K for his work.

How exactly is EEACS paying for this $25 million project? Currently they have an operating budget, according to their website, of $20 million. 

But this is not their first big athletic project. In March, 2023, they announced that they would be building a 28,000 square foot fieldhouse for around $7 million. For that project, they partnered with the Lehigh Valley Health Network. Announced Lysek:

Our partnership with LVHN is a game-changer for Executive. Besides collaborating, the partnership will bring internship opportunities to our students with a career pathway program, scholarship opportunities — along with in-house expertise that will provide us with athletic trainers, strength and conditioning professionals and medical and mental health programs that will benefit all our students.

No such partnership has been announced for the football stadium.

We can debate all day the wisdom of dropping huge piles of money on school athletic facilities. But at least with a real public school, that discussion can be held by representatives elected by the taxpayers. EEASC gets to throw all these taxpayer dollars around without having to answer to taxpayers at all. 

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This is it. This is Germany in the 1930s and what you do will be recorded in the history books. Your children and grandchildren will look back and ask what you did. Will you be able to look them in the face? Chris Cillixxa won’t be able to, but I sure as hell will.

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Chris Cillizza is auditioning for a new job. After being fired from CNN in 2022 for being too boring, Cillizza has been flipping through his Rolodex, hoping someone would give him another high-paying gig writing listicles and whitewashing fascism. He landed here on Substack because that’s where all the former news people run to when their careers derail.

Now that Bari Weiss is running CBS News, though, what a golden opportunity for a bottom-feeder like Cillizza! Weiss, as you’ll recall, is the opinion writer who has been failing up for years because of her shameless ability to shovel whatever bullshit is required to protect Republicans from the consequences of their actions. At the helm of CBS News, she will turn actual reporting into propaganda for the regime, and Cillizza wants in so badly he can taste it.

That’s what this article is about:

I’m not going to dig into the minutiae of the article because all of the masturbatory smugness boils down to a single cookie-cutter paragraph:

Put simply: I don’t think either party gets it right 100% of the time. Which is why when Republicans do something dumb, I call them on it. And when Democrats do something dumb, I do the same.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Pablum:

noun

1. (Trademark) A form of cereal for infants.

2. A diet that does not require chewing.

3. Worthless or oversimplified ideas.

4. Chris Cilliza.

I came across Cillizza’s audition for CBS last night (I really MUST stop scrolling after I’m done working for the day) and I popped out a quick retort on Notes.

I can’t say what got Cillizza’s hackles up. Maybe one too many people accurately calling him an enabler? Maybe poking a hole in his “I could be rich if I sold out” schtick as if he ever had to worry about money again in his life.1 Or maybe (probably) pointing out that his children and grandchildren will view him with disgust in 20-30 years. Hindsight is a terrible thing.

Whatever it was that got under his skin, Cillizza shot back an ill-considered response:

Why do I call this “ill-considered?” When I engage with criticism, and I do, frequently, I think about how my responses will be read and how they may, in turn, be responded to. Cillizza did not do this so now we’re going to have a conversation about his “actual work.”

Let’s skip over the listicles and other inane drivel he puts out because he’s lazy. Instead, we’re going to focus on two things: Bothsiderism and Hillary’s emails.

I was already going to write a piece of bothsiderism because it’s the cancer killing our democracy and Cillizza, along with people like David Brooks and Chuck Todd and Maggie Haberman, etc. etc. is one of the main carcinogens poisoning us.

When a lying scumbag like Cillizza says, with a straight face, “I don’t think either party gets it right 100% of the time. Which is why when Republicans do something dumb, I call them on it. And when Democrats do something dumb, I do the same.”, they are making a deliberate choice to muddy the waters.

Cillizza’s false equivalence is so gross and obnoxious, it’s a wonder Bari Weiss hasn’t already offered him a lifetime position as Chief Political Correspondent.

This moral blindness is endemic to Cillizza’s writing. Even when he is criticizing Republicans, he cannot stop himself from slipping in, “but Democrats are also to blame for blabla fucking bla.” Both sides, y’all. Both sides.

Cillizza knows he’s lying. He knows that even at their worst, Democrats are not literal fascists. That even if pronouns and BLM and Trans rights and rainbow flags set your poor, oppressed white man's teeth on edge, Democrats will not have you arrested for tweeting that the president is an asshole. Or have the FBI show up at your house for attending a peaceful rally. Or try to revoke your citizenship because you have a mean text on your phone.

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Cillizza knows Republicans are opening concentration camps. That they’re murdering dozens of immigrants in prison. That they’re building a massive surveillance state to spy on American citizens with the specific intent of labeling dissent as terrorism. That their explicit goal is a fascist theocracy. That their party is swarming with pedophiles and Nazis and rapists. He KNOWS this.

But Democrats are also a problem because…something something Trans kids and socialism and messaging. So you see, “when Republicans do something dumb, I call them on it. And when Democrats do something dumb, I do the same.” There’s really no difference between the two parties!

Cillizza is a professional propagandist. He’s been paid handsomely for decades to lie to the public about how “extreme” both sides are. Why, did you know if you find a wild activist on the street or online, that’s the exact ideological counterbalance to the entire fucking Republican Party embracing fascism? It’s true because in no universe can Cillizza look at even the most progressive Democrats and consider them “extreme.”

Take Zohran Mamdani. His wildest, most insane position is…tax the rich. Make housing affordable. Open up city-owned supermarkets in food deserts. Fucking baby baskets. AHHHHHHH!!!! Not the fucking baby baskets!

That’s so mainstream, overwhelming majorities of the country are in favor of it. What? Are we ALL extreme? How does even work?

Meanwhile, literally everything the regime is doing is polling underwater and getting worse by the day. The GOP is about to make 20+ million kids go hungry because they refuse to give back a trillion dollars in healthcare they stole. That’s the definition of extreme.

But, you know…both sides, right, Cillizza?

Now, Cillizza says he doesn’t pick sides. But here’s the funny thing: He absolutely fucking did in 2016, when he was still sleazing around at the Washington Post:

Chris Cillizza has written more than 50 posts mentioning Hillary Clinton’s emails since March on his Washington Post politics blog The Fix, nearly all of them issuing dire warnings about the supposedly “massive political problem.”

The New York Times first wrote about Clinton’s email during her tenure at the State Department on March 2, when they falsely reported she had violated federal requirements by using a private email account. Since then, mainstream media outlets have attempted to find some scandal in the email story, often pushing various falsehoods and being forced to issue corrections after the fact. To date, there has been no evidence of any lawbreaking.

Cillizza has been a major contributor to this effort, repeatedly claiming the email story “just keeps getting worse” and that it’s “not going away,” while claiming Clinton has an “honesty problem” and should “start panicking.”

It’s important to understand that Cillizza can’t seem to crusade against Trump like this despite a decade of scandal and incompetence and open criminality. For a guy who doesn’t pick a side, he sure went all in on Team “Fuck Hillary Clinton.” But these days? Well, both sides, y’all. Both sides.

Did Cillizza ever apologize for this? Of course not. And why should he? Undermining the Democratic nominee was his job. Obscuring how unfit and dangerous Trump was was his job. Selling the “both sides” lie was his job.

History will not be kind to Cillizza.

When I was a kid, I saw this WWI poster, and I never forgot it.

The look on his face suggests that answer is not one he’s proud to give.

True, it was for the First World War, but it still applies to the Second, doesn’t it? I always wondered what I would have done when the Nazis marched. I think about it a lot these days. This poster was explicitly what I had in mind when I posted that Note about Cillizza and his kids and hypothetical grandkids.

He’s a public figure and someday, his kids (and grandkids) are going to understand who he was and what he did. And they will more than likely be appalled. And I think Cillizza knows it, which is why my post rankled him so much.

We are in a fight against fascism. White nationalists are roaming the streets in masks, kidnapping people and disappearing them into concentration camps. The United States military is occupying cities (sort of). The vast power of the federal government is being turned against its citizens with the explicit goal of silencing dissent and stealing elections. Political violence is on the rise, and no matter how badly Cillizza will pretend it’s “both sides,” the violence is still overwhelmingly coming from the right.

In the face of all of that, Chris Cillizza won’t pick a side. Imagine explaining that to your grandchildren.

“You see, both parties did bad things, so I didn’t pick a side.”

“You mean when literal Nazis were trying to destroy the country, you sat there and did…nothing?”

“That’s not true! I held both sides accountable!”

“So you would have written articles about how Churchill was really no better than Hitler? And you think that makes you a good person?”

“But this wasn’t the same thing!”

“It kind of was, actually. And you really just pretended to be neutral while fascists tried to overthrow democracy? What the fuck is wrong with you? You dick!”

“Easy to call names. Harder to do the actual work of trying to suss out what is actually happening beyond the spin.”

I don’t have to worry about that. I’m not a scumbag willfully helping Republicans stab democracy in the back. And yes, Cillizza, you know exactly what you’re fucking doing, you ratfuck. It doesn’t matter what stories you tell yourself or how much money you’ll make whoring yourself out to whitewash the regime. Your descendants will look at you the same way the descendants look at the photos of the men and women standing around the body of a lynched black man.2 They thought they were good people, too. History judged otherwise. Now they are a source of shame and embarrassment. That will be your legacy.

Of course, Republicans might win. Then you’ll be a hero to the regime. You can drop the pretense of “not taking a side” and happily collect that paycheck as a mouthpiece for hate.

Better hope none of your kids or grandkids turn out to be gay or trans, though. The regime will cart them off to the camps, no matter how many names you have in your Rolodex. But that’s OK because you didn’t take a side, so you can’t really say who is right and who is wrong. You just call balls and strikes. What a beacon of moral clarity you are.

Enjoy your short-lived career as Weiss’s stooge.

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Blissful ignorance. That’s what it is to go through life unaware that people around you – walking down the sidewalk, parked next to you at McDonalds, living in an apartment just down the street – are hungry.

Hunger leapt into the news this week when it became clear that the Trump administration would refuse to use some $6 billion in USDA contingency funds to pay SNAP nutrition benefits to recipients when regular funding for the program runs out on Saturday. You’ve probably seen the stories: USDA, in violation of the Hatch Act, incidentally, put up an intentionally false statement on its website that Democrats had “voted 12 times not to fund the food stamp program,” blaming the votes by Senate Democrats not to reopen the government on their wanting to “hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures” rather than provide food for hungry Americans. The Obamacare supplements that Democrats are holding out to keep funded have nothing to do with providing health care to “illegal aliens,” who are ineligible, or gender affirming care which is not covered by the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans just can’t help themselves. They make everything about immigration and “transexual for all,” as Trump continually calls anything having to do with any sort of departure from his executive order that there are only two genders, male and female, and fuck anyone who was born or believes differently.

It’s not about immigration and gender. It’s about hunger, and the fact is, if the USDA does not agree to follow the law and provide emergency funding for SNAP, or the Senate refuses to vote for an emergency bill that would fund the program, or if 23 states led by Democratic governors do not succeed with a lawsuit filed today that would force the expenditure of contingency funds for SNAP, 42 million Americans will fall into what is euphemistically called food insecurity on Saturday.

It’s not food insecurity. It’s hunger. About 16 million of those receiving SNAP benefits are children. Another 8.5 million are elderly, and about 4 million are adults with disabilities. Those people are among the 42 million who will begin going without adequate food on Saturday, or they will have to start making decisions about where they will cut their budget, like skipping rent or utilities, to leave money for food.

I’ve never gone hungry -- not as a child, not as a young adult, not in middle age, and not now as I cruise through my “senior” years. But it doesn’t take much trouble in one’s life to become one of those who experience the gnawing terror of not having enough to eat. You might get laid off from a job, you might not be able to find a job, you might get in a car accident and have injuries that prevent you from working, or you might have just gotten out of prison and don’t have a place to live or a way to make a living, or you might be elderly and on Social Security and run out of money near the end of the month after paying your rent and utilities and grocery bills earlier in the month.

Or you might be a soldier in the Army who is not paid enough to make rent and car and insurance and utility payments and have enough left over to buy warm winter clothing for your wife and children and yourself…and buy enough food for your family until your next payday.

That is indeed a thing. Lower ranking members of the armed services, especially if they are assigned to a military post that is in a high cost of living area like Washington D.C. or Los Angeles or even Kansas City or Chicago, are not paid enough to live on. They are eligible for SNAP and something called Family Subsistence Supplemental Allowance (FSSA) to help raise their income to 130 percent of the federal poverty level for the area in which they live.

That’s right: Military pay is low enough that it just barely reaches federal poverty levels in many areas of the country. A private first class in the army with less than 3 years’ service earns about $2,700 a month in base pay. A private with dependents – a wife or husband and children – also earns about $1,600 per month in housing allowance. The base pay for a private first class is just about equal to the federal poverty level in the area around the Pentagon in Northern Virginia. Miliary housing allowance pushes it over, but not by much.

When I was in the army in Colorado in 1969 and 1970, privates and other low-ranking enlisted men were paid just below and just over $100 a month. It was a different time. You could rent a trailer for $50 a month, an apartment for a little more than that. In my platoon, I had enlisted soldiers, most of whom had just returned from Vietnam, who had wives and one or two children who had to live off the post at Fort Carson and make do on that money. I had no idea how they were doing it. Every day, it got to be 5 p.m., they got in their cars and went home to their families.

I was a platoon leader, and as one of my extra duties, I was the mess officer in charge of the mess hall. One day, one of my cooks approached me after work. He had been a Hells Angel before being drafted and had belonged to a very rough chapter in Riverside, California, east of Los Angeles. His Hells Angels chapter, like many others, was in the illegal business of manufacturing and selling methamphetamine. He had a wife and child, lived in an apartment off post. That day, he told me his wife had left him and took their daughter, who was 2 or 3 years old, went back to Riverside, had linked up with his Angels chapter, and was now the “old lady” of a rival member who had become the head of the Angels chapter.

A friend had sent him a letter telling him that hepatitis was running through the chapter due to intravenous meth use. He was afraid his wife and child were going to come down with the disease. He was desperate to get them to come back to Colorado, but his wife wouldn’t listen to him. She was tired of living in poverty as the wife of a low-ranking cook in the army.

He asked me if I would call her and help talk her into coming back to Colorado Springs. That night, he came to the trailer where I lived just south of Fort Carson, and we called his wife. I can’t remember what I said to her on the phone, but somehow, I talked her into returning to her husband. She agreed to take a Greyhound bus from Riverside back to Colorado, but neither she or her husband had the money for a ticket. The next morning, the cook and I went to Western Union, and I wired her $25 for a bus ticket.

A few days later, she was back in Colorado, living with the soldier in their rundown apartment off post. To thank me for helping him, the soldier, by now a corporal, invited me to dinner at their apartment. I showed up to find that the menu being served was exactly the same as the one in the mess hall that day – chicken and potatoes and canned green beans. The dishware and tableware was military-issue, “borrowed” from the mess hall, as was the food he had cooked.

That was the way they were making it. I discovered that the mess sergeant was running a loosely organized food theft system. He would take surplus food from the day’s menu – there was always more than enough to feed the company – and sell it off the mess hall loading dock to guys with families – 10 cents for a chicken, a dime for a small sack of potatoes, a dime for a #10 tin can of beans or peas. Most of the guys in the company who were married and living off post were feeding their families that way.

This was 1969. That year, there was a revision of the law in the food stamp program. I saw a story in the paper about the way the program had changed, and the story gave me an idea. A few days after the “borrowed” dinner at my cook’s apartment, I drove him and a couple of other guys down to the food stamp office in Colorado Springs and signed them up for the program. I remember exactly how it worked. At that time, recipients paid in cash for an amount of food stamps that was a multiple of their payment. My cook, with a wife and a child and an army income around $100 per month, paid $20 in cash and received five times that amount in food stamps, nearly as much as he earned in the army.

Over a period of a couple of weeks, I drove a dozen guys in my platoon down to the food stamp office and signed them up. A sergeant in my platoon who had three kids got more than his pay in food stamps. Word spread. Other lieutenants started to do the same with their platoons.

I had a rather grim meeting with the mess sergeant and told him that selling surplus food to the troops every evening was over. From then on, one of the cooks, on a rotating basis, would hand out surplus fresh and canned food every other day or so from the loading dock. On days fried chicken was on the menu, the army would supply us with 80 fresh chickens for a company of about 125 soldiers. Sometimes, we would have 20 left over, sometimes 10.

We distributed it all. I had 12 guys in my platoon on food stamps. Other platoons had a similar number. The word got out that a third of the company was receiving food stamps, and I was behind it. I got called in by the brigade commander. Having soldiers on food stamps was not a good look for his brigade. It was “bringing discredit on the army,” he told me. He ordered me to disenroll the guys from the food stamp program.

By that time, I had looked up the regulations. There it was, spelled out in federal-ese. They were eligible. I told the colonel that discredit on the army came from hungry soldiers with hungry families.

I got a mark against me on my record, that already had more than a few such marks. But we didn’t have any hungry families of soldiers in my platoon or the other platoons in the company.

The food stamp program back then, and the SNAP program today, is one of the best things this country has ever done. It didn’t end hunger, but it made a big dent. Having enough to eat should be a right, not a privilege. From the window over my writing desk, I can see a small food pantry cabinet run by the Methodist Church across the street. Every day, I see cars drive up, and I watch people get out and stock the cabinet with cans and boxes of pasta and rice and other nonperishables. I watch cars drive up and people get out and take an armful of cans or boxes and drive away.

The parade of cars and people and cans and boxes of food, and back in Washington D.C., the SNAP program, even with its struggles, amount to living proof that this country has a soul. Even with all its struggles, that soul is a good one.

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He does it every day, often several times a day. He’s walking out to his Marine helicopter, or he has reporters into the Oval Office while some president or prime minister is visiting, or he gives a speech like the one in Quantico a couple of weeks ago, and he says something or he does something that gets a headline because it’s outrageous and unprecedented and sometimes there are Constitutional consequences.

Today on Air Force One during his Asia trip, Trump once again “mused,” as the mainstream media calls it, about seeking a third term. He did the same thing last February, and in March, and after telling NBC News that “a lot of people” were asking him about it, he said he “was not joking.” It’s in the Constitution that he cannot serve a third term. He may think “his” Supreme Court will help him out, but mostly, he wants us to worry and get depressed that somehow, it might happen.

But it isn’t just his trolling or baiting the media. It’s everything else, and I mean everything. It seems not a day goes by that there isn’t another horror. Over the weekend, he had the USDA announce about the SNAP program on its website that “the well has run dry” and “there will be no benefits issued on November 1.”

That is not true. By law, the Department of Agriculture must maintain a reserve to pay SNAP benefits during times that there are unusual stresses on the system, and there is $6 billion sitting there in the treasury for just that purpose.

But the “law” doesn’t matter to Trump, and that is another part of his despair campaign. The Supreme Court unleashed the maniac with its decision in Trump v. United States, and he takes full advantage every time he can.

Let’s run down just what he’s done recently. He demolished a third of the White House without going through the mandated process, not just for federal buildings owned by the taxpayers, but for the White House itself. His Department of Defense shot yet another so-called “drug boat” out of the water without providing even a scrap of evidence that the boat was carrying drugs or headed for the United States. He has denied emergency federal funds to two counties in a blue state, Maryland, while providing the same sort of aid to red states, and he came right out and said that was why he was doing it. He is attempting to send National Guard troops from the state of Texas to two states where they have no business being, Illinois and Oregon. His deployment of masked federal “agents,” who refuse to show their identities, to arrest and deport undocumented migrants has inevitably rounded up U.S. citizens in their dragnets and denied them their rights under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.

He threw a tantrum over a television ad aired in Canada that accurately used footage of Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs, and he restarted an already insane trade war with our ally by imposing yet another tariff on them. He ordered the movement of an aircraft carrier group from halfway across the world to the waters off Venezuela, obviously in contemplation of an invasion of that country, just because he could do it.

Since taking office, he fired employees of the Department of Justice simply for doing their jobs when they prosecuted January 6 insurrectionists or worked on prosecutions run by Jack Smith. He has targeted his critics such as John Bolton and James Comey and ordered his attorney general to prosecute them. He has attacked law firms that have angered him by representing people whom he has declared his “enemies.” He has launched an assault on higher education by requiring colleges to change their hiring and admissions processes, and if they don’t do what he wants, he has cancelled their research funding.

There is nothing in the law that permits him to extort law firms or colleges or target critics with ginned-up prosecutions. In fact, all those things are a violation of the law, and he just does it.

And on and on and on it goes. I’m sure you could provide your own list of outrages. Here’s another one: his so-called “executive order” cancelling birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution.

Can he do it, any of it? The answer is, yes he can, and he has done all of it, and he is doing it not just to please his MAGA base, but to send his opponents into a downward spiral of despair.

I get the question from readers almost daily: What can we do? Well, I have a few answers that may not make you happy or satisfy you, but here they are.

The first thing is, don’t take the bait and fall into a depression that we are somehow losing our grip on this country. Bad shit is happening, but there have been 400 lawsuits filed in federal court to stop Trump from his attempts to throw out the law and the Constitution in his deployment of federal agents, the National Guard, his clearly illegal executive order cancelling birthright citizenship – I could go on. Federal judges have issued temporary restraining orders and criticized lawyers from Trump’s Department of Justice for incompetence and ignorance of judicial procedure and all manner of other failings.

There is a movement, or several movements, to overturn practically everything Trump has done or attempted to do.

We have taken to the streets in No Kings protests, millions of us, in solidarity with each other and with the rule of law and the Constitution. This is no small matter. The protests are not spontaneous, but they have no central organizing organization, and they are not concentrated just in big cities, but in hundreds of smaller cities and towns across the nation in every single state in the Union, including protests in red states.

Many of us may indeed feel a sense of despair when we wake up every morning. How could we not? But we are not sitting back and taking this shit. Trump is said to be preparing the ground to “steal” the midterm elections. But he is already fucking that up by telling people not to vote by mail. Republicans are going to lose upcoming elections in Virginia and New Jersey. People are angry that their votes are being manipulated in states where gerrymandering is being forced by Republican legislatures and governors, and organizing is already happening to counter these chickenshit attempts to rig elections for the House in the midterms.

I think there is one important thing that can be done that has not occurred yet but should happen immediately. Our former Presidents of the United States should get together, all of them, and not only join the resistance, but lead it. Barack Obama has been giving speeches. Yesterday, in a speech in Boston, Joe Biden made the kind of strong statement that all the former presidents should be making on a weekly basis. Biden said, “Since its founding, America served as a beacon for the most powerful idea ever in government in the history of the world. The idea is stronger than any army. We’re more powerful than any dictator.”

We are indeed. Bill Clinton should be out there giving speeches. So should George W. Bush. All our former presidents lived and served the American people in the White House that Donald Trump is now desecrating not only with his presence, but by tearing it down in a naked and illegal attempt to rebuild it as a monument to himself.

Do these men whom we elected want to be the former presidents of a former democracy? By all reports, each of them hates Donald Trump, even Bush. They hate what he is doing to our country. They should get together and make clear their opposition to what Trump has done and is doing to tear down not only the White House, but our Constitutional order.

Let this be a clarion call to Presidents Biden and Obama and Clinton and Bush. We need you. You were elected by your fellow citizens to lead us while you were in office. We need your leadership now more than ever.

They should step up, and so should we. Despair is not an option. We need to fight with every cell in our bodies. I am proud of this country. I am proud to be a citizen. I want my children to have a country of which they can be proud to be citizens. I am distressed, but I am not in despair. I’m going to fight — we’re going to fight — until our last breath for this country and our democracy.

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