Great or not quite so great after all?

 

Yahoo News

Talk about racial or ethnic profiling, the Trump administration is now going after voters with Hispanic-sounding names.  In Nevada, officials recently found that all 185 people the Justice Department had flagged as potential noncitizens were actually US citizens. 

I do hope that Donald Trump and his allies will take a severe drubbing in the next election and that we can finally get Mr. Trump out of politics for good.  He's been nothing but bad news for our country and even for the entire world.  If he tries to run as vice president on the next Republican ticket, that may well doom that ticket, as American voters have finally started getting pretty darn fed up with him.

Is Donald Trump actually the very worst, most incompetent, and most corrupt chief executive that we've ever had in the 250 years of our nation's existence?  I might not go that far, as I wasn't alive back when Andrew Johnson was president, as he is usually ranked as the very worst of all. 

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Andrew Johnson (17th President): Often ranked as the worst or among the lowest due to his fierce obstruction of civil rights for newly freed slaves and his dismantling of Reconstruction after the Civil War, which led to his impeachment.

Wikipedia: Among scholarly rankings, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt are most often ranked as the best, while James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Donald Trump are most often ranked as the very worst. 

If Hillary or even later Kamala (or both) had taken presidential office in the US, not only would the glass ceiling finally have been broken, but our country would be much better off, so much more respected around the world than is the case right now.  Of course, Donald Trump actually considers himself to be the very greatest. most competent, most beloved American president of all time.  Any lesser evaluation of his presidential tenure is simply "fake news." 

“O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!  Robert Burns (1759-1796)

President Donald Trump has published a self-ranking on Truth Social placing himself alone in the very top category labeled "The Greatest," evaluating himself as being superior even to presidents like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.  Wow, what a guy! 

Wash, Post, Trump says his political operation is spending $400 million on midterms

Wash, Post,

5 things to know about the federal judge Trump called a ‘crazed lunatic’

(Who is actually the crazed lunatic?)

Psychology Today

                                Is It Possible to Have Too Much Self-Confidence?

                                            When self-assuredness hides a deeper insecurity.

Donald Trump has recently been whining that Fox News is trying to be "politically correct," no longer supporting him as much as he rightly deserves.  (Even Fox has been cooling on Trump now.)

President Trump still wants to change the name of the state of New Mexico to New America, but folks living there are having none of it, vowing to keep their traditional name.  The president can call he state whatever he wants, but its residents are now looking forward to the end of his term. 

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Virginia Tech  in Blacksburg, Va., where both my late brother and father taught architecture classes, just started a new semester.  Our family still supports especially female architecture students. 

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News Analysis

NY Times, As Alberta Rejects Separatism, Carney Gets Much of the Credit

Prime Minister Mark Carney won over Canada’s most conservative province by promising a pipeline and campaigning hard, defeating its efforts to secede.

I follow Alberta politics as my late father was born in Stavely, Alberta.  My paternal great-grandparents raised 12 children on a wheat farm in southern Alberta. 

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Here now is a family of rare red wolves, the very most endangered species of wild wolves.  They may not actually be red.  Too many wolves have already been killed, so now do need protection.  Livestock can be kept safe with fences, real or virtual, not by killing wolves or other wild animals.  Let the wolves live; they are an essential part of the ecosystem. 

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Below is a message to a longtime friend living in Kenya who had once stayed at my former home in Washington, DC,  attending a training program there.  He had now wanted to send a friend coming to DC my way, but, alas, I am no longer there.  

 

Hello Boniface.

Wonderful to hear from you but I no longer live in DC, rather in rural Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, with my son and his dog in the house depicted here.

I had to shrink the photo of our house, but hope you can still see it.  Nothing like my house back in Washington, DC.

My son (copied here) works at a local hotel called CoolFont.  I had to sell my 3-story house in DC built in 1895 because every year the annual property taxes kept rising, thus forcing me out.  The house also needed repairs.  So I sold it and bought this house where I am now living with my son.  I wish I still lived in DC to be able to accommodate the GAO fellows, who could even walk there from my home.

I really enjoyed having them and hope they find accommodations, but anything in the Capitol Hill area where I used to live is now very pricey.

You might even say that I was priced out myself. 

If you want to find out more about my life now at age 88, check my blog honduraspeacecorps2.blogspot.com

I have not been back to Honduras, where I once served in the Peace Corps as a health volunteer, for over 2 years now.  I used to serve in Honduras as a volunteer Spanish medical interpreter, but I went there on my own and can no longer afford that now.  I still speak Spanish, as I have native fluency, and I also worked on-call as a Spanish medical interpreter in hospitals back in DC, but no one around here speaks Spanish except the proprietors of the local Mexican restaurant. 

I am not fond of our current president, but my son voted for him as did many other people, which why he is the president right now.

Tell me what's going on with you and your family these days and please send me a photo of you with your family. 

Best wishes, Barbara  (I sent him my photo giving a new wheelchair I had brought her to a woman in Honduras.)