Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

So Sunday, despite the snow cover, Junior Son, Little Miss and I took Peri's ashes over to Fort Snelling National Cemetery. We brushed back the snow, sprinkled the ashes around FIL's grave, then covered them with snow. I'm sure that was not regulation, and there's probably some rule about it, but we didn't much care. She was his dog in every sense of the relationship. And I think FIL woulda liked that we did that. He probably was waiting for her with cheese in his pocket. 

And another door closes behind me. 

This election has certainly taken a toll on me...and, to be honest, most of the people I know. It's hard to be optimistic when the swamp Donald Trump said he was going to drain was only so he could hire the alligators. The people he's choosing are unskilled labor. He thinks he's putting iconoclasts into place when all he is doing is setting up the collapse of government as we know it.

Bitch about government all you want, but Social Security checks still find their way to your folks. Medicare still covers your parents (and maybe your own) health insurance. The roads are still open for use, the planes still take off and land, the ports operate, and the courts support the Constitution and the law of the land. You wanna compare it to other countries? Sure look at the Finnish schools or Swedish nationalized insurance. No system is perfect, but none of those countries stretch from sea to shining sea either. It's a ruddy miracle states unite to form a federal government that is reasonably functional. Yeah, yeah, it has its shortcomings and disasters, but overall...

Trump tells America he can make it great again. Terrific. Let's see what he's got. 

So before he is even POTUS, he cuts a deal with UTC and Carrier, touting how he has saved a factory and jobs by tough talk and tax incentives. What it doesn't say is that the Carrier plant in Huntington, IN is closing altogether and those jobs are going to Mexico. From the Washington Post Fact Checker:

Trump claimed he saved 1,100 jobs. That’s false.

Earlier this year, United Technologies announced that it was sending 2,100 jobs in Indiana to Monterrey, Mexico — 1,400 from the Carrier plant and 700 from a United Technologies Electronics Controls (UTEC) facility. About 300 administrative and engineering jobs at the Carrier plant and 100 similar jobs from UTEC plant would remain in Indiana. Both announcements were made on Feb. 10.

Trump’s deal would keep 800 workers in Indiana, or about 38 percent of the total who were due to leave the state, according to a spokesman for United Technologies. These jobs were focused on making gas furnaces. About 600 jobs — focused on making fan coils — will still go to Mexico. Meanwhile, the 700 UTEC workers will also lose their jobs to Mexico, though workers at the plant — which makes microprocessor-based controls for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration units — had gotten their hopes up after Trump’s announcement that he had struck a deal with United Technologies.

In claiming 1,100 jobs, Trump is including 300 jobs that never were going to Mexico in the first place. He also is conveniently forgetting about the 700 jobs from UTEC, though both announcements were made at the same time. Trump tweeted Sunday that he will slap a 35 percent tariff on any company that ships jobs to another country, so it’s unclear whether United Technologies snookered Trump or Trump snookered United Technologies.

How about his promises to the coal miners? He can bring back coal? Good luck with that. The abundance and low cost of other energy sources put paid to that idea, cheap natural gas being the lead reason coal demand has fallen off. Not regulations. Not President Obama. It's the marketplace, people.

And if you think his chat with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen was an accident, you have another think coming. Looks like this was a well planned conversation, and one designed to be a provocation directed at China, who, in turn, filed a diplomatic protest. Naturally, Trump tweeted about this. It was so.... spontaneous. Sure it was.

On the home front, the astounding increase in harassment, hate speech, and vandalism directed at "others" is enough to set off bells, alarms, whistles, fog horns, and claxons all at once. Every day, there are more and more reports of violence and harassment directed at Muslims, Jews, and the LGBTQ communities. It's not subtle, it's not hidden. It's right out there in the open. A friend of mine recently poo-pooed my concerns, dismissing them as unlikely to happen. My response? "You would've done well in Germany in 1932."

And all Herr Trump has said is: "stop it."  Yeah, like that's gonna have an impact. 

I cannot take the bullshit. Really. I keep going back to Charles Durning doing SIDESTEP from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas: 

Look, I'm all for ruffling feathers and changing the status quo. What I'm not for is lying, prevaricating, and being stupid. These guys are not playing chicken with widgets. These guys are going to have access to military deployment and big red buttons. 

I have no faith the Congress is going to do anything to stop the march of hatred heading smack dab toward us. I have no faith that the Supreme Court is going to be functional in a year. And I have no faith that the middle class of this nation will survive. 

Most of all, I want to be proven wrong. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the week

If you need to renew or obtain a passport, do so sooner rather than later.