And Make Sure You Call Him "Sir"

Who is right? A former all-pro offensive tackle for the New York Giants or arguably the most charismatic sports personality in the nation? As a sort-of friend from my youth would say, "you have three guesses- and the first two don't count."

This guy is a clown. The corruption is OFF the charts but he bends the knee to a con job. https://t.co/CfGiWzxQ1E

— Jumbo Elliott (@JumboElliott76) May 6, 2025

The New York Times reports 

For months, Mr. Trump’s forays into crypto have created ethical conflicts with little precedent in presidential history. As he markets digital currencies to the public, Mr. Trump has also appointed regulators who are scaling back crypto enforcement and called for legislation that would boost the industry’s prospects in the United States.

As news of the dinner invitation spread on social media, the memecoin’s price surged more than 60 percent, suggesting that investors were rushing to accumulate enough coins to qualify for a dinner seat.

“This is really incredible,” said Corey Frayer, who oversaw crypto policy for the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.”

A business entity linked to Mr. Trump owns a large tranche of the coins, meaning the president personally profits every time the price increases, at least on paper. Mr. Trump and his business partners also collect fees when the coins are traded, a windfall that amounted to nearly $100 million in the weeks after the coin debuted in January.

Victoria Haneman, a law professor at Creighton University, said the offering raised concerns about the ways Mr. Trump and his businesses “may maneuver to profit off the presidency."

Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, suggests (emphasis his) the possibility "we (n)ever saw anything as blatant as this meme coin dinner "not sure we ever saw anything as blatant as this meme coin dinner." The Times explains 

The flashy online announcement called it “the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World,” a chance to have “an intimate private dinner” with President Trump at his members-only golf club in Virginia, followed by a tour of the White House.

A seat would be reserved for each of the top 220 investors in $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency that Mr. Trump launched on the eve of his inauguration.

In an astonishing escalation of the Trump family’s efforts to profit from crypto, a website promoting $TRUMP, the president’s so-called memecoin, announced on Wednesday that the coin’s largest buyers would be invited to meet him. The effort was, in effect, an offer of access to the White House in exchange for an investment in one of Mr. Trump’s crypto ventures.

“Have Dinner with President Trump and the $TRUMP Community!” the invitation said. “Let the President know how many $TRUMP coins YOU own!”

However, Bookbinder warns

... unfortunately, for the most part, our ethics laws outside of the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution don’t apply to the president. Those clauses bar the president from receiving profits, gains or advantages from foreign, state and federal governments. Unless a state, federal or foreign government purchased the $TRUMP coins, there’s very little we, or anyone, can do.

But because the buyers behind crypto transactions are generally not disclosed, foreign governments could in fact be buying these coins, meaning that Trump could be violating the Constitution without the public finding out. Individuals or special interests could also be buying the coins in the hopes of directly influencing presidential decisions that will affect all of us. Here, too, the public likely wouldn’t know.

Nonetheless, the man whose colleagues enjoy calling "Stephen A." says

Whether you're an elected politician or someone who likes to do business with him, you're going to have to recognize you're going to have to appease him to some degree....

And that's what you're going to have to learn about him, if you don't already know. If you want to do business with him, you're going to have to make sure that you're ready to engage at some level of capitulation.

Appease and capitulate? Joe Scarborough/Mika Brzezinski tried that. Bill Maher recently tried that. But the man is a politician and actor. As a successful politician, he knows the importance of making you feel appreciated or respected. As an actor, he pulls it off without a hitch.  

Al Gore also spoke nicely to Trump, when the month after Trump was first elected "I had a lengthy and very productive session with the president-elect. It was a sincere search for areas of common ground.... I found it an extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued."

After continued discussions, Gore woke up, as the former vice-president realized "I think he has made it abundantly clear that he's throwing his lot in with the climate deniers."

Yet, Smith wants to appease, and capitulate to, President Trump. It worked so well for a British prime minister 85-90 years ago. Why not try it again?

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Tear Down This Myth

Scott Jennings is a GOP strategist who appears regularly on CNN's News Night with Abby Phillip and  is a potential entrant into the 2026 Republican primary to replace retiring Senator Mitch McConnell. There are other likely candidates for the nomination but it would be foolish to sell Jennings short because he is a favorite of Donald Trump, whose Administration he defends exceptionally well at every turn.

He's very skilled, on television and on X Twitter, at selling an alternate reality.

I've been with the President recently. I've watched him in these meetings.

Let me state plainly: There is no chaos.

Unlike the previous administration, there's no doubt who's running the country, and it's President Donald J. Trump. pic.twitter.com/saDy7p33aB

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) May 3, 2025

Donald Trump may be running the country. But evidence to the contrary keeps accumulating as

Donald Trump gave a completely incoherent response to a question about his crackdown on Harvard University and ended up ranting about fictional riots.

During a phone interview with NewsNation Wednesday, Stephen A. Smith, the firebrand sports pundit turned political commentator, asked the president to expand on a comment he’d made about Harvard University, which has seen $2.2 billion in government grants frozen by the current administration.

Smith asked Trump what he would say to those who view his attacks against the Ivy League school as “an attack on academic freedom, rather than a defense of fairness.”

“Well, I say this. We had riots in Harlem, in Harlem, and frankly if you look at what’s gone on—and people from Harlem went up and they protested, Stephen, and they protested very strongly against Harvard. They happened to be on my side,” Trump said.

“You know I got a very high Black vote. You know that? Very, very high Black vote. It was a very great compliment to me,” Trump continued.

The president appeared confused about the subject of the question, ranting about Harlem instead of Harvard and inventing a fictional riot in support of his war on higher education.

Trump’s stumped response is particularly disturbing because, crucially, Smith repeated the word “Harvard” three times in asking his question, and was responding directly to something Trump had just mentioned. Halfway through the question, Trump seemed to realize his mistake, but then felt it necessary to comment on the support of Black voters, which was at that point entirely off topic.

There have been concerns over Trump’s cognitive decline since he first started to deliver weaving, nonsensical stump speeches on the presidential campaign trail. Now his divorce from reality manifests mostly in his disastrous economic policy, as the president is more or less kept away from making lengthy addresses.

Last October, a senior lecturer at Cornell University's Psychology Department and Weill Cornell Medicine Psychiatry Department remarked

What’s alarming is how the rate of Trump’s bizarre speech and political decisions have been increasing. He gave an answer about childcare to the Economic Club of New York so incoherent that even his supporters were concerned. Last week he got cognitively lost in a rally and began to talk about the ‘eight circles’ that Biden filled up with journalists. No one on his staff has been able to explain the reference.

Trump has shown evidence of dementia for the past year as indicated by his strange gait, phonemic paraphasia—when he begins a word and can’t finish it—and decline in the complexity of his words and concepts. This limited capacity explains his poor debate performance, but there are two more disturbing signs of his decline.

Since when? In February, 2017 the NYC, NY office of Donald Trump's doctor, Harold Bornstein, was raided by Trump's personal bodyguard, a lawyer at the Trump Organization, and a third man, and the president's medical records were stolen.

On Saturday, November 16, 2019 President Trump was suddenly whisked away to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a still-unknown reason.

Four days after an apparent assassination attempt of presidential candidate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in July last year

the public is still in the dark over the extent of his injuries, what treatment the Republican presidential nominee received in the hospital, and whether there may be any long-term effects on his health.

Trump’s campaign has refused to discuss his condition, release a medical report or records, or make the doctors who treated him available, leaving information to dribble out from Trump, his friends and family.

In an interview five weeks ago, psychologist Dr. John L. Gartner explained

When we’re diagnosing dementia, what we need to see is a deterioration of someone’s own baseline of functioning. What we see that a lot of people don’t appreciate is that when Donald Trump was younger in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs; now he has difficulty even finishing a sentence. His thoughts were logical and related: now they’re tangential. He goes off on these ramblings where he is confabulating things – weird things in which he’ll talk about Venezuelans and mental hospitals, and then he’ll talk about sharks and batteries or the late, great Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs. And why is he talking about Hannibal Lector – a fictional character who was not great; he was a murderer, a serial killer. It makes sense in Trump’s mind but these are really random associations. And there is an accelerating rate of decline….

He is losing his capacity for coherent speech. We’ve collected dozens and dozens of Trump’s phonemic paraphrasias, in which you use sounds in place of an actual word  (a hallmark of brain damage and dementia).  What happens is that someone is trying to say a word and then they get the first part out but they have to end it or create one because they can’t remember the rest. Trump will say something like ‘mishiz’ for missiles, or “Chrishus” for Christmas, because he can’t complete the word. Then we see also a lot of semantic paraphrasias, in which he uses a word incorrectly, as in “the oranges of the situation” because it rhymes with “the origins of the situation.” This is not within normal limits; his basic ability to use language is breaking down.

So there is that verbal deterioration. And then there is the physical deterioration. He used to be quite graceful, and now he uses a wide-based gait typical of frontotemporal dementia, sometimes he swings his right leg in a semi-circle. He also has trouble getting up the ramp; he has trouble doing physical things.

 And sometimes Trump is lucid or articulate. On other occasions, he is baffling or incoherent. It's that way with an individual suffering from an ailment, whether physical, mental, or psychological. It was that way with President Joe Biden, also; it's why General Mark Milley in October of 2023 could maintain "I engage with him frequently, and (Bidenis) alert, sound, does his homework, reads the papers reads all the read-ahead material, and is very, very engaged in issues of very serious matters of war and peace and life and death."

Biden probably declined from that point to his June, 2024 debate with Donald Trump. However, his bizarre performance that night probably was due to an individual in decline- as Trump clearly has been- who had a very bad night, which was interspersed with many good days. For some reason, President Trump's diminished state has not received 5% of the scrutiny which President Biden drew.

It is highly unlikely that Donald Trump is running the country in the manner Scott Jennings wants us to believe. However, it is not his responsibility as a shill of the President to reveal the true state of the politician he publicly venerates. Moreover, Jennings knows that much of the source of the spell Trump has cast on the public derives from the perception of Trump as strong and powerful and whether right or wrong, always in charge. It's time for the Democratic Party, which must oppose this dangerous man, or an inquisitive media to tear down this myth..

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Better: "Wes Moore Confirms He Won't Say Whether He's Running for President"

She's not stupid. She is playing a role.

The stupidity here is painful. https://t.co/7GinmSM47T

— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) May 1, 2025

This Pam Bondi wasn't stupid, and neither is this one. As reported in The New York Times shortly after Donald J. Trump was elected to his second term

Reports of deceptive practices and fraud by Donald J. Trump and his Trump University business unit had been piling up for several years in states across the nation, including in Florida.

The state attorney general in New York moved in, filing a lawsuit in 2013 that accused Mr. Trump and his for-profit trade school of “engaging in persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct,” even though by that point Trump University was already out of business.

The Florida attorney general’s office, which Pam Bondi had taken over in 2011, handled it differently.

She publicly acknowledged that her office was examining complaints about Trump University, but it decided against a formal investigation.

The decision came soon after Mr. Trump, through his family foundation, sent a check for $25,000 to a political action committee associated with Ms. Bondi, who was running for a second term.

(It appears also that Kamala Harris received $5,000-$6,000 donation from Trump after Harris took office as California Attorney General- that is, far less money for political moves in a significantly larger state.)

In 2016, Bondi would tell the Tampa Bay Times "I never, nor was my office, investigating him. Never. I would never lie. I would never take money. I've been obviously devastated over this." (She has recovered from her devastation quite nicely.) That's the same Pam seen in the video below boasting that seizures of fetanyl by "your DEA agency" has "saved "258 million lives." Credit the Attorney General with coming up with a very odd number, thus adding a whiff of credibility to a truly incredible number.

Since then, Pam Bondi was nominated (and ultimately approved) as Attorney General of the USA with a mandate from the most powerful President in history to go after his enemies, and hers if she wishes. One suspects that the intersection of that Venn diagram is conveniently quite large. 

But stupid? I'll show you stupid. This is a portion, beginning at 8:02 of the video below, of the May 1 episode of The View in which Joy Behar, Alyssa Farrah Griffin (who evidently likes Moore a lot) and the three other women chatted with Democratic governor Wes Moore of Maryland:

The Importance of Shedeur

The man who destroyed the USFL weighs in: 

What is wrong with NFL owners, are they STUPID?” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Deion Sanders was a great college football player, and was even greater in the NFL. He’s also a very good coach, streetwise and smart! Therefore, Shedeur, his quarterback son, has PHENOMENAL GENES, and is all set for Greatness. He should be ‘picked’ IMMEDIATELY by a team that wants to WIN. Good luck Shedeur, and say hello to your wonderful father

Alex Kirshner of Slate explained "the industry consensus on Sanders was that he was something like the 20th or 40th best player in the draft, depending on one's evaluation of him." However

Any other quarterback will join a team as a backup trying to work his way up, and Sanders did not distinguish himself in the pre-draft process. He reportedly came off disinterested in interviews with teams. He passed up numerous chances to work out in front of scouts. His celebrity father used his megaphone to promise Shedeur would be a top-five pick and to threaten to manipulate the draft process so that Shedeur would only go to a team the Sanders family wanted him to go to, à la Eli Manning in 2004.

In other words: Sanders is good enough to be at least a second-round pick, but teams don’t want the pain in the ass of a development quarterback with the capacity to create drama.

Nonetheless, this goes way beyond the story of yet another greatly talented, spoiled athlete and even beyond an unusually spoiled athlete. It goes to Donald J. Trump and the reason for his assessment of the value of Shedeur Sanders to an NFL team.  Last October, ethicist Daphne O. Martschenko wrote

In a recent interview with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Donald Trump drew a link between immigration, violent crime, and genetics, stating, “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”  Comments such as these are not new. Claims regarding genes and human behavior have long been used to perpetuate social harm. Understanding this history shows just how pervasive and harmful the former president’s comments are. They also illustrate how influential they can be in shaping social policies.

Trump’s interview with Hewitt wasn’t the first time the former President made disparaging comments about migrants. During his October presidential debate with Kamala Harris, for instance, he claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating pets – harmful misinformation that has left many members of the Haitian community fearful for their safety.  The Hewitt interview also wasn’t the first time Trump vocalized false ideas about genes. In 1988, for example, he was recorded on the Oprah Winfrey Show saying to its host, “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” Later, while running for president in 2016 and throughout his tenure in the White House, Trump was captured in video recordings making statements like “some people cannot genetically handle pressure.”

The former president’s latest comments about immigrants bringing “bad genes” into the United States are part of a longer, racialized history in which claims about genetic difference have been used to further social divisions, explain social inequalities, and justify racial violence. Specifically, such claims have been used to resist the abolition of slavery, prohibit interracial marriage, forcibly sterilize the poor and communities of color, restrict immigration, and even rationalize mass-shootings.

Donald Trump's second term thus far has been marked by many things: siding with a brutal dictator in his war of aggression in eastern Europe; a disastrous economic policy; a shakedown on law firms; lawsuits against media outlets; invocation of "DEI" in an effort to bring down major universities and critical funding of medical and scientific research; impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress; arbitrary, wholesale, and dangerous cuts to the federal workforce; corruption, and so much more.

And an extremist immigration policy. When Trump spoke to Hewitt about immigrants, he argued "you know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now." Then- Presidential press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded in part "this comes from the same vile statements that we've had, that we've heard about migrants being poison, poisoning the blood- that's disgusting."

Jean-Pierre was being generous. She probably did not want to use the word "racist" for fear of being slammed as just another liberal accusing good, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth conservatives of being racist. "Racist" or not, the previous December

“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told the crowd at a rally in New Hampshire. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

Trump then repeated the use of “poisoning” in a post on his social media website Truth Social, saying overnight in an all-caps post, that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”

The term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” in which he criticized immigration and the mixing of races. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote.

President Trump's immigration policies are a mere reflection of his creed of eugenics. Now, he has stressed- with capital letters so that no one can misunderstand the dark place he's coming from- that Shedeur Sanders is "all set for Greatness" because he has "PHENOMENAL GENES.:

Sanders is only a football player and whatever happens to him is far less important than the potential impact in America and abroad of Trump's belief in nature rather than nurture, that good and bad are inevitable outcome of genetic makeup. Whether cause or effect of the perspective Trump holds, in mid-October, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated of autistic children "These are kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted."

As Politico found, this belief is very much flawed. However, as Jennifer Grose wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times, "the grimmest part of what he said is not about the ability to play baseball; it's that he started this litany with paying taxes and having jobs. That implies that those who are not able to be gainfully employed are somehow lesser citizens- that they're destroyed." 

This fellow who believes that some citizens, for reasons beyond their control, are lesser than others will be in charge of the nation's response to a pandemic. He will share responsibility with a president who himself believes that some citizens are lesser than others. He reportedly told Trump Plaza Hotel and casino manager Jack O'Donnell in the 1980s "laziness is a trait in blacks"- a trait. In 2007, he remarked to Larry King "But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot."

   

Call it racist, fascist, or "hateful" and "disgusting" as Jean-Pierre politely did in response to Trump's comment to  Hewitt. Whatever the characterization, danger lurks with leaders who believe that some "poison the blood" while some have "phenomenal genes" and thus are set for greatness. Draconian immigration policy may be only the first, and far less significant, manifestation of the presidency of a man who believes that the most important measure of a person may be the sum total of his or her chromosomes.

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Respecting the King and Emperor

"Our culture," Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie stated weeks ago, "is that these are optional things. if you want to enjoy this, come along and we'll have a great time and if you don't, it is totally an optional thing." Accordingly

President Donald Trump feted the 2025 Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles at the White House on Monday, but several players, including quarterback Jalen Hurts, decided to skip the celebration.

Hurts and other players cited scheduling conflicts as the reasons for their absences, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Still, Trump called Hurts a “terrific guy and terrific player” who turned in “one stellar performance after another” in helping the Eagles to a 14-3 regular season and their Super Bowl run….

Asked by a reporter on the red carpet of the Time magazine gala last week whether he would take part in the White House visit, Hurts responded with an awkward “um” and long silence before walking away.

Eagles star running back Saquon Barkley visited Trump over the weekend at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and caught a ride with the president to Washington on Air Force One and then to the White House on Marine One.

“He loved it,” Trump said of Barkley’s short flight on the presidential airplane. “He’s a great young guy and an incredible football player. Saquon had a season for the ages, running behind the most powerful offensive line in the NFL,” Trump said.

Barkley, meanwhile, pushed back on social media criticism earlier Monday for spending time with Trump. He noted that he has golfed with former President Barack Obama, a Democrat.

lol some people are really upset cause I played golfed and flew to the White House with the PRESIDENT. Maybe I just respect the office, not a hard concept to understand. Just golfed with Obama not too long ago…and look forward to finishing my round with Trump ! Now ya get out my…

— Saquon Barkley (@saquon) April 28, 2025

Here is a concept which is not hard to understand: Barack Obama is not President. Nor is Barack Obama the immediate past President.  Obama is not the guy whom Donald Trump called "the worst President in history," whom he still claims, despite all evidence to the contrary, he defeated in 2020.

It is no defense that Donald Trump was the prime birtherism conspirator, the fellow who relentlessly claimed that then-President Obama actually was born in Kenya, hence ineligible to have been elected President. That would be all the more reason for Barkley- anyone- not to have honored Trump.

If that were the only idiotic comment made by Saquon Barkley, it still would have been pathetic. However, there was the rationale- maybe I just respect the office- which made his outing with Trump more reprehensible.

Barkley chose to respect an office and honor the man who holds an office he himself does not respect.  Trump doesn't have to be a Gerald Ford, who when he was sworn in as vice president during the Watergate scandal, humbly conceded "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln."

Donald Trump compares himself to Lincoln in a different way, Introducing "Trump digital trading cards" in December 2022, he proclaimed "This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington."  

Evidently, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt, let alone Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, were mere pikers. Trump first declared himself "king" this past February (video below). Afterward, in the space of the next eleven weeks, Trump went from "he who saves his Country does not violate any Law" to "probably" the "best king in history" (on 3/30) and then "I run the country and the world."  Trump already had crowned himself "the chosen one," as he did in August of 2019 and upon anointing himself king on March 30, 2025.

Donald Trump in December of 2022 called for the "termination" of the Constitution so that he would be declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Now that he is King, the Chosen One, and Emperor, is Creator and Master of the Universe next? If I didn't know better- and Saquon Barkley appears not  to- Donald Trump has no respect for the law, for the nation, or for the presidency.

Saquon Barkley was the Eagles' best skill position player and arguably the second best running back in the league last year. A superstar, he could have followed- or led- the twelve Eagles (including one traded, one released, and one retired) who courageously declined to attend the ceremony with King Trump, the self-recognized representative of the Almighty. Alternatively, he might simply have pled that he couldn't pass up the opportunity to be honored at the White House.

Pucker up, Saquon! Donald Trump once tweeted "Pres. Obama is about to embark on a 17 day vacation in his 'native' Hawaii, putting Secret Service away from families on Christmas. Aloha!" If he knew of this tweet, yet another inference that the first black President was not really an American, perhaps Saquon Barkley would not have paid tribute to Donald Trump.

Just kidding! Of course he would have.

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One Nation of Many Religious and Political Viewpoints

The United States of America: born 1956.

The Texas Senate on  a party-line vote approved in March a bill that would require public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. It now goes to the state House of Representatives for consideration and if passed, probably will be signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott.

The  legislation was co-authored by Republican senator Mayes Middleton, who following the vote claimed "our schools are not God-free zones. We are a state and nation built on 'in God we Trust. Litigious atheists are no longer going to get to decide for everyone else if students and educators exercise their religious liberties during school hours."

However Texas was founded, its leaders on March 2, 1861 evidently took a break from their commitment to the Almighty when the state seceded from the Union in its God-fearing effort to maintain their right to own other human beings. The motto "In God We Trust" was placed on coins during the Civil War but was omitted when the coins were redesigned a few decades later. It did not reappear until 1956 amidst an alliance of conservative businessmen and Protestant clergymen embarked on a "faith, freedom, and free enterprise" crusade. Even GOP legislators in Texas ought to know that 1956 was some 180 years after the nation's founding.

A similar bill passed the Texas senate in was 2023 and was being considered by the House Public Education Committee when a portion of the hearing, the questioning of bill sponsor Candy Noble, was posted by Democratic Representative James Talarico.

Texas Republicans are trying to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

I told the bill author: “This bill is not only un-constitutional and un-American, it’s deeply un-Christian.” #txlege pic.twitter.com/TI7TmGvIKM

— James Talarico (@jamestalarico) May 3, 2023

Talarico currently is enrolled in the Master of Divinity Program at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the nation's dominant- and relatively liberal- Presbyterian sect. According to the LGBTQIA+ organ PRIDE, Talarico quoted Scripture. Then drawing upon the Apostle James, he stated "A religion that hs to force people to put up a poster to prove its legitimacy is a dead religion, and it's not one I want to be a part of. It's not one I am a part of."

A divinity student is capable of a more complex and nuanced reading of Scripture, though any challenge to the professed and questionable religious faith of the proponents of such a bill should be welcome. More profoundly and significantly, Talarico added (emphasis his)

Every time on this committee that we try to reach students values like empathy or kindness, we're told we can't because that's the parent's role. Every time on this committee that we try to teach basic sex education to keep our kids safe, we're told that's the parent's role but now you're putting religious commandments- literal commandments- in our class room, and you're saying that's the state's role. Why is that not the parent's role? 

Good question? No- great question.

It's a great question not only because it cuts to the core of right-wing hypocrisy. It also points the way toward the proper balance between church and state, and between parents and the public school. Immediately before he made that remark, Talarico asked Noble "do you believe schools are for education and not indoctrination?" After Noble answered "absolutely," Talarico stated "I guess what I'm trying to figure out is why is having a rainbow in a classroom is indoctrination and not having the Ten Commandments in a classroom."

Having the Ten Commandments in a classroom is indoctrination. So, too, is having a rainbow in a classroom (except as representation of an optical phenomenon). Recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance falls into the same category.

Each is a form of indoctrination. Yet, there is a critical difference setting one apart from the other two. Of "from many, one," historian Thomas A. Foster noted

Although “In God We Trust” is the official motto, “E Pluribus Unum” has long been acknowledged as a de facto national motto. After all, it is on the Great Seal of the United States, which was adopted in 1782. Moreover, in the 1770s and ’80s Congress opposed a theistic motto for the nation, and many of the founders worked hard to prevent one from being established.

It is not government's role to promote a religion, or religion, especially among children in a classroom. Nor is it government's role to prevail upon children the official perspective on gender or sexuality, except through implementation of wise public policy.

As diversity among public school students grows, there will be more children of families which do not practice Christianity or claim a Judeo-Christian heritage. Some of these students, because of their faith parental influence, and/or other factors, will not accept the dominant mentality of the day toward LGBTQ+ issues. So be it.

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance also is indoctrination, yet an indoctrination of a different sort, and necessary. As time marches on and the world continues to flatten, there will be more students who were not born in this country or whose parents were not born here. But now they are Americans- or if not, should be encouraged to become Americans. They are heirs, all of them, to a great historical tradition: of a nation birthed not of a people but of an idea, "flawed in execution but pure in spirit," enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.  It's more difficult to foster that idea than ever. It is also more important.

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"The People that Hate America"

This man is what in the old days we called "a piece of work."

Fentanyl kills 25,000 more ppl than gun-related and 39 of 54 of the @MichiganDems voted in favor of fentanyl #MIGOP #MILEG

— Matt Maddock (@matthewmaddock) April 23, 2025

An investigation by CBS News" 60 Minutes in 2024 revealed

When a gun is recovered at a crime scene, it's the job of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to trace it. Tim Sloan was ATF's attaché in Mexico from 2019-2022. As attaché he ran the ATF's four field offices in Mexico. In 2019, an incident at a cartel ranch near Guadalajara made a lasting impression on him.

"There was dead bodies everywhere...There were 55 gallon drums with body parts in 'em," said Sloan. "And all the weapons in that house came from the United States. All of them."

Sloan says most of the guns the ATF traced in Mexico were sold directly to traffickers or to so-called "straw purchasers," someone who buys a firearm on behalf of another person

"You're offering a 23-year-old girl in Arizona $4,000, $5,000 just to go into a store and buy a gun for you," Sloan said. "She's going to do that. A lot of people are going to do that, especially if they have any addiction problems, but no criminal record."

If buyers do not have a criminal history, in certain states, they can buy as many guns as they want. After that comes the easy part, "just drive across the border, " explained Sloan.

The ATF traced 50,000 American guns recovered in Mexico from 2015 to 2022 to gun dealers across the United States…

State Representative Maddock: It's the guns, stupid. And they come from the USA. Michigan Democrats have nothing to do with it. State legislators who wallow in their absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution do.

But this isn't about guns or  drugs. It's about this piece of work remarking

We're not doing this for the retired Communist professor. We're doing this for the families and the kids who gaze upon their great Gulf of America and put their toes in the water. "Look, mom," I'm in the Gulf of America."  

This guy doesn't understand that being in the Gulf of Mexico- a different country- would more impress a child living in America than being in the Gulf of America. That should make a difference if one believes that the major factor in naming major bodies of water should be to bolster a child's self-esteem. (I'm guessing Maddock is not a child psychologist by profession.) He continues

Exciting things- like, uh, make people proud of our country, the most loved President in American history wants people to be proud of their country. The left want people to be ashamed of their country. And I don't think it's any coincidence that the people opposed to that are the same people that hate America. This is a way to show kids that our great faith that they should be proud of their country.

Michigan State Rep. Matt Maddock (R-Milford) says anyone that opposes his bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico hates America.

"I don't think it's any coincidence that the people opposed to this are the same people that hate America." pic.twitter.com/HS8FqxB1a6

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) April 24, 2025

Now the "kids" should be proud of their country when they go into history or social studies class and learn that the body of water called the Gulf of Mexico throughout the world is called the Gulf of America here. 

No reason to take pride in Thomas Jefferson's line in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. Immaterial is pride in freedom of religion, of speech and the press, from armed police arbitrarily barging into your home, from not having to raise $10,000 bail for a shoplifting charge, even to own a firearm within reason. 

And don't even think about pride in the Armed Forces, because the "Gulf of America" is our great inheritance as Americans.

Yet, most extraordinary in these times is a Republican state legislator holding a straight face while maintaining "that the people opposed to (a fentanyl bill) are the same people that hate America." The bill recently approved by the Michigan House of Representatives increases prison sentences for manufacturing and selling fetanyl, carfentanil, and heroin. 

Some Democrats, wisely or unwisely, voted against the bill because of the disproportionately harsh impact they believe it would have on marginalized communities. This seems a little less hatred of country than

The Witch Hunt continues, and after 6 years and millions of pages of documents, they’ve got nothing. If I had what Hunter and Joe had, it would be the Electric Chair. Our Country is Rigged, Crooked, and Evil — We must bring it back, and FAST. Next stop, Communism!

Or of federal workers directed to give detail their workweek 

And it's possible that a lot of those people will be actually fired. And if that happened, that's okay, because that's what we're trying to do. This country has gotten bloated and fat and disgusting and incompetently run.

Incompetently run is possible, because it was already 36 days after he took office that Donald Trump denigrated this country and its citizens, enough time for him to begin to sabotage the vibrant representative democracy he was handed. And on October 30 of 2022 he did inadvertently warn us, slyly and indirectly, of his upcoming crooked leadership. Maybe that's what his supporters mean when they say that Donald Trump has kept his promises.

Yet, it seems it should be of more than passing interest that the President of the country and leader of the (still, barely) Free World thinks its people are evil and disgusting; or more exactly, that the nation is evil and its citizens, disgusting. And significant it would be if anyone took notice.. 

That's less the fault of the media, which can barely be held responsible for something Donald Trump's critics care about, than of his critics. But that would mean the Democratic Party has noticed this and cares about it. It must do both, and at least one is absent.

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