Ward on Words

I watched "The Manchurian Candidate" (the 1962 version with Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra) this week. It's an excellent film and I highly recommend it. But I was surprised to see the theme of a Russian takeover of the US presidency so prominently displayed during the Kennedy era. Of course, that was during the height of the Cold War, when we were so fearful of a global communist takeover that we went to wars in Korea and Vietnam in order to prevent such a disaster. The wars themselves were disasters. Communists were the enemies we fought and in "The Manchurian Candidate," the Russian communists very nearly gain the presidency.  But now it is a quarter century into the 21st century; Russia is no longer a communist nation, but until recently, it remained our enemy. Trump, of course, has had a long relationship with Putin; he frequently expresses admiration for the man who is a dictator. In 2018, he took the side of Russia instead of the FBI, a...

I am reading "The Snow Leopard" by Peter Matthiessen, a highly acclaimed, award-winning travel book and I'm having a very hard time with it because the author's wife died the year before this trip and Matthiessen left behind his 8-year-old motherless boy to go on this adventure. From early in the book: "Later I dreamed about my beautiful eight-year-old boy, whose mother died of cancer just last year. In the dream, I paid a visit to a dark cagelike shelter, where he was being kept with other children...." Sounds like a tormented nightmare of a man who knew what he did was terrible, if you ask me. When I was a girl, my mother died of cancer and I cannot imagine what it would be like if my father had left myself and my sisters for nearly a year right after that. It would have been very bad for all three of us. But this is what men can do, abandon their motherless children for the sake of their own personal quest and ambition. In the introduction to the book, Pi...

Trump has been in office for less than 100 days and it is an unmitigated disaster. He's plunged the world into chaos and hired a federal contractor, Elon Musk, whose companies rake in billions in federal contracts, to shed jobs and contracts and leases from the federal government, all of which were funded in budgets passed by Congress. Many of Musk's decisions are being challenged in court. Federal lawyers refuse to say who heads up DOGE (the poorly named Department of Governmental Efficiency, named to honor Musk's favorite cybercurrency .) It's not a new department - it's not even a department, which, as I understand it, needs to be created by an act of Congress. Trump via executive order has temporarily renamed the United States Digital Service as DOGE. Oddly enough, the USDS website is still up and running . None of it makes any sense.  The actions of DOGE have included firing thousands and thousands of federal employees, most involved in social services or huma...

The last day of February in 2025 was a milestone in the destruction of the United States of America. Trump and Vance invited Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House for a discussion on ending the war in Ukraine. The meeting devolved into a yell-fest from the two Americans. It was extraordinary to witness this exchange and to realize that America has fully sided with Vladimir Putin and authoritarianism.  Vance – a Midwesterner who came to fame claiming "hillbilly values" ruined his western Ohio steel town, located on the banks of a river, elevation 700 ft., not in the mountains of Appalachia – said in this meeting , "... the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy. We tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping his chest and pretending that the president of the United States' words mattered more than the president of the United States' action." There was no diplomacy coming from the American president and his trusty "attack dog...

Valentine's day was yesterday and JD Vance, Trump's VP, and Pete Hegesth, Trump's Secretary of Defense, were at the Munich Security conference, and both shared their views on the ills of Europe and the values of Russia.  German Chancellor Olaf Scholz later rebuked Vance for his open alignment with a far-right party that supports Nazi actions at Dachau, among other reprehensible things.  “'A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,' Mr. Scholz said at the conference on Saturday morning, in an address opening the gathering’s second day. At the same conference,  Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was confirmed despite widespread allegations of alcoholism and sexual harassment (even his mother talked about his flaws in an email to her son!), expressed open support for Russia's goals for Ukraine. He invited far right political activist Jack Posobiec on this trip , prompting fears that a Trump nominee would politicize the military....

Wednesday, Sept. 27 was a bit misty. I knew rain was predicted for later in the day and the rest of the week, so in the morning, I took the dog for a walk at the local greenway. It was pretty and the leaves were just beginning to turn. The rain was soft and despite the damp in the air, my dog and I enjoyed the walk. Later in the day, the rains turned heavy, but Wednesday morning, the rain was a soft patter - no cause for alarm until later in the day.                                              Wednesday, Sept. 25 – the calm before Helene Perhaps the tornado that touched down later that afternoon in a nearby town should have been more alarming sign of the devastation to come. But I grew up in tornado territory in Illinois, and though tornadoes are extremely rare in the Southern Appalachians, THIS tornado was small and did n...

Since taking office on Jan. 20, 2025, the new president has issued hundreds of executive orders attacking the role of Congress and taking a big ax to the Constitution itself. Through his EOs, he has prevented NIH from communicating with the public; halted previously approved research funding, heavily impacting university research programs; froze previously approved federal spending from being disbursed at all; banned birthright citizenship - and much more. Some of these actions are in the courts. With regard to the EO banning birthright citizenship, a judge, appointed by Reagan, said this was the most unconstitutional order he'd ever seen . We'll see how the Federalist Society ideologues on SCOTUS approach this issue.  On Inauguration Day,  pressure from Elon Musk sparked the resignation of the head of the FAA . The first fatal plane accident in 16 years happened less than two weeks later. An American Airlines plane, carrying competitive ice skaters, collided with a military ...

Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025. He did not place his hand on the Bible when he took the oath of office.                                              Trump takes the oath of office without placing his hand                                                        on the Bible. We know that if any Democrat had failed to place their hand on the Bible, the resulting hollering from the right would be endless and all too loud. But there are two rules these days - morals and standards and laws for Democrats to uphold and absolutely no morals or standards or laws or even job qualifications for Republicans to uphold and exhibit. Immediately after taking the oath to p...

Today is a remarkable day in US history because the man who incited violence at the Capitol on 1/6/21 specifically to stop the certification of the election he lost just has had his electoral victory certified in a "peaceful transition of power," as those over at the Washington Post called it.  Four years ago today it was a completely different story. Weeks before the election certification day, Trump had invited his base to come to DC on 1/6/21 to "stop the steal." That there was no evidence of a steal was not relevant to Trump. He wanted to remain president and he wanted his supporters at the Capitol on January 6.  On that day at noon, the day that the 2020 election was to be certified, Trump held a "Save America" rally in the Ellipse in DC. You can find the transcript of his speech here . Behind the scenes, his son and others in his team danced and partied , happy to be involved in an attempt to overturn the election Trump lost. In he speech to his bas...

2025 started off with a horrific domestic terrorism incident in New Orlean s – a US Army veteran from Texas plowed an Ford F150 into a crowd of New Year's Eve revelers who were celebrating at New Orleans' historic Bourbon Street, killing 14 people and injuring many more.  Later on January 1, 2025, a US Army soldier killed himself in his Tesla in front of the Las Vegas Trump Hotel . In a letter, he urged American insurgents to use his death as a "wake-up call " to address the country's ill.  After the New Orleans explosion, the president-elect went on record claiming that the incident was the result of Biden's "open borders" policy. His Truth Social post was retweeted nearly 14,000 times. His lie was widely disseminated. Factually, the US does not have an open border policy; the veteran who killed 14 on New Year's Eve in New Orleans was a Texan, not a migrant - but facts don't seem to matter to the president-elect. Fox News spent much of New Y...

John Roberts, a man who attained the most powerful legal post in the country because he aligned with the values of the Federalist Society, an extreme right-wing organization, has issued his annual diatribe against anyone who complains about the corrupt actions of his court . Once again, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States has used his bully pulpit to whinge about the public's anger at the corruption of the Roberts Court.   How corrupt is the Roberts Court? Let me count the ways... Mrs. John Roberts earned millions "consulting" law firms, many of whom had cases in front of her husband .  Clarence Thomas, in a class of judicial corruption all by himself, has accepted multiple excessive gifts from people with cases in front of the court and he did not disclose these gifts as required by law. On any other bench, he would have been removed long ago.  Sam Alito, also happy to accept massive gifts from "friends" with cases in front of the cour...