Cultists on January 6 at the US Capitol

Threats won't silence me!

Echo opinion published in The Democrat Star, a Maryland newspaper:

Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980)

Beginning in 2015, when Donald Trump (aka TFG) commenced his campaign for president, his hateful followers have attacked me with threats and violence because of the things I say opposing them and their vile disgraced failed twice-impeached leader through the yard signs I post, my involvement in rallies, and the letters and commentary I have published in local media. The one characteristic that these cultists all have in common, in addition to opposing others’ 1st Amendment rights, is that they are all cowards, too afraid to reveal their identities so they go to great lengths to hide them.

The first incident occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign when several of them drove onto our property and ran down my yard signs for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. After I put them back up with a very heavy concrete block under the Clinton sign (hoping they would tear up the undercarriage of their pickup), they decided they didn’t like that so went back home and brought back diesel fuel to pour all over the signs and our property, then lit it on fire on a windy very dry night. Our home could have caught fire and injured or killed me and my wife. A neighbor saw them, but the Sheriff’s office was unable to apprehend them.

During the 2020 campaign season, Trump cultists tore up our lawn by driving all around and spinning up turf and mud. Then, while I and my fellow Democrats were holding a rally along Rt. 50 in Cambridge, they vandalized our cars by defacing the finish and breaking windows. They also violently attacked MY U.S. Capitol, The People’s House, on Jan. 6 in an insurrection act of domestic terrorism to overthrow MY government. It felt as if they had attacked our home.

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic.

Recently, they have decided to try to intimidate me into silence by sending threatening letters ....

to me by name, to my home address. They are postmarked from Baltimore, and I know several neighbors who live there and come here on the weekends. These letters typically arrive soon after I’ve published another letter/column in local papers.

Here’s the one thing I want these hate-filled cretins to know about me — they will NEVER stop me from exercising my 1st Amendment rights, and if anything their hateful attacks only incentivise me to go after them and their cult leader even harder. I will do anything to prevent them from taking over our great country and turning it into a North Korea or Russia with an authoritarian dictator such as Trump.

From Mike Brown in Cambridge, Maryland

Biden says there's no more Republican Party; but like the pebble in a shoe they continue to cause political pain

Vice President Joe Biden is getting out ahead of the political rhetoric by discrediting Republicans, regardless of what they're prepared to say about him as a potential presidential candidate. In other words, Biden is telling Americans not to give credibility to a political party that can't pull itself together, like the frustrated, disorganized and discombobulated right wing GOP.

"Post Politics", blogger report from Cambridge, Maryland, Ed O'Keefe writes, "Vice President Biden began laying out the Democratic Party's argument for voters in this year's elections Friday morning by suggesting that Republicans remain splintered and would quickly seek to pass fiscal policies rejected in recent years, if they retake control of Congress".

Biden said, "There isn’t a Republican party. I wish there were, I wish there was a Republican party. I wish there was one person we could sit across the table from and make a deal and make the compromise and know when you got up from the table that the deal was done," in remarks at the House Democratic policy conference being held in Cambridge Maryland.

"There is no -- all you had to do was look at their response to the State of the Union, what were there, three or four? I think we should get a little focused here, let's get a little focused," he added later.

Biden also heralded the recent passage of bipartisan budget and spending agreements, but warned that Republicans would quickly seek to pass conservative budget and spending proposals rejected in recent years by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

This blogger says it's worth mentioning how Biden's comments were made on Maryland's Eastern Shore, the peninsula, nearly the same place where Republicans held their "retreat" a few weeks ago.

Certainly, Biden knows where to rally the Democratic base, when he said, ""Does anybody in this room think that the Republican Party has walked away from the Ryan budget? (Of course not!) Does anybody in this room think that, if they're able to take the Senate, or increase their numbers or maintain their numbers in the House, that that's not what we're going to get back to?" he asked.

Indeed, Biden's remarks infuses Democrats with  cold shivers of regressive public policy when he reminds us about the ominous prospect of Republican leadership. 

Unfortunately, Biden's reality check is badly needed because, for some reason, people have short memories. Ryan's budget, in fact, cuts everything except tax loopholes for the rich. Likewise, although Ryan claims to be a Roman Catholic who, undoubtedly, must have ancestry on his father's side rooted in the great Irish immigration during the later part of the 19th century, has a very-very short memory. His own immigrant family benefited from sharing the wealth of tax revenue and his Roman Catholic faith supports social justice programs like universal health care, that Ryan opposes.  

Probably, Biden is correct to call attention to the fractured Republican party, due to the GOP right wing being drawn into radicalism. Yet, even a small pebble can cause extraordinary foot pain, even in an old comfortable shoe.  

Republican leaders are right-right and righter wing radical ideologists. For example, Senator Marco Rubio speaks like a Charlie McCarthy puppet about upward mobility, and the American Dream, while proposing to cut programs and oppose a raise to minimum wage, to support a chance for economic prosperity for those who need help. Rubio leads a pack of extremists who are invested in regressive public policy.

It's time the real Republican party throws out the extremists. Instead, Republicans must support the intentions put forth in the US Constitution.  "We the people in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense,  promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and prosperity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.  

Republicans must stop being the right wing party. Instead, they must read and internalize the US Constitution and stop being the pebble causing acute pain in our democratic public policy.