News & Articles

More humanity needed on the border

The other day I was watching an old episode of Law and Order SVU about imigration, which was a version of former  president Trump’s on  how to handle the problem at the southern borders by seperating families and putting them in seperate internment areas. I remember hearing on the news where the people working with the children were instructed not to comfort them and only do the very basic care such as with feeding infants and changing their diapers, but nothing else. It also showed the crowdedness of some of them and how some never knew where their family members were.

I hate to think of it happening again if he gets his way. There must be a more humane way to solve the problem.
Cecilia Hill
Duluth, Minnesota

Where is the great children’s book about factory farms?

Although 95% of food animals are raised on factory farms, children’s books haven’t changed. Please take a little time to think how you would write and illustrate a children’s book about the lives of animals on factory farms.
Karen Moore
Duluth, Minnesota

Let’s get real

Recently Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies, even though he is a poor persecuted billionaire who resides part-time in New York, where his case was not even tried by the federal government. So how can the entire justice system be out to get him? The poor guy might have to spend some time in prison deprived of his golden toilet!

If any other president had done what Trump has, the Justice Department would go after them, too, no matter which party they belonged to. However, Nixon had the grace to step down, and Clinton admitted he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. However, Trump was tried by a 12-member jury, and interviewed by both the prosecuting and defense attorneys who (each) deemed that all 12 were non-biased! But first, Trump was indicted by a grand jury (also non-biased) that deemed that he could be tried.

Isn’t it funny that several judges appointed by Trump presided at several of 45’s stolen election cases, and dismissed them for lack of evidence, a fact that the extreme right explains away by claiming those judges feared “the deep state” – even though the judge who tried Trump’s New York case insisted that the court would act according to established legal protocol? So under what disguise did “the deep state” hide to go after Trump’s New York Judge as well? – a Judge whose family’s lives were sure to be threatened by “The Proud Boys” and  “White Nationalists” – who openly praise Hitler and other fascist bigshots!

As expected, Trump had the gall to call Merchan “very conflicted,” because the judge’s daughter works for a campaign consulting firm. But Marchan’s daughter does not influence him and, is not part of Trump’s case! 
Merchan has also made three small donations to Act-blue plus a $15 donation to Biden’s campaign. So yup!
How neurotic and conflicted is a judge who risks his reputation by exercising his right to support candidates and doesn’t always support Republicans? 
A few small donations four years ago are not grounds for recusal! But the ways Trump delayed, attacked and deflected, to avoid following the law, makes his disrespect for the justice system an open book, and his hatred of President Biden and Biden’s family is a big part of it.
You’ve got to hand it to a showman who denied taking part in arranging the Insurrection but tried to use fake electors to override the results of an (already) fair election! This guy also lost two AGs who both resigned, not because they couldn’t follow the law – but because they would not obey Trump! In fact, during the several years of this political circus vilifying Democrats has functioned as Trump’s shield, and the DOJ has bent over backward to avoid treating him with bias while demonstrating nothing but fairness! Yet Trump paints himself as a poor persecuted victim while discrediting the law and claiming that his appointed judges were afraid to rule in his favor due to threats from the bogeyman which Trump calls the “deep state?” Sorry, but that’s pure BS! Even Jews and those whom Hitler deemed unfit to live according to fascist edicts, spoke up before and after surviving Buchenwald and Auschwitz, where they were brutally tortured in these and others of Hitlers prize death camps, along with many spies who worked for ourselves and our allies, who all risked the same kinds of deaths, (but kept fighting fascism anyway)! So don’t let Trump turn this political circus inside out and upside down, without offering even a shred of proof! Instead, consider these wise words from the writings of George Orwell;

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”  
“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
Some more from Orwell.
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. Not consistently concluding it is 3, 5, 8, 11, etc.”
Remember, the truth has often been to inconvenient to tell!
Peter Johnson
Superior, Wisconsin