Mahler's Prodigal Son

Maureen Dowd, columnist in The New York Times , never takes any prisoners in the views she expresses.     She doesn't hold back in her latest column " Wild Child Takes Charge "........ " So now we’re getting the crazy straight up. The Doomsday Clock is ticking faster, the resistance is growing, and teetotaler Donald Trump already seems drunk with power. He’s got the role of his life and he’s casting his show: Steve Bannon is his Roy Cohn, the combative hammer and agitprop genius; Theresa May is Maggie to his Ronnie; Ivanka and Jared are his consiglieri, family to help him figure out who stays and who gets iced; Vladimir Putin echoes the role of Trump’s dad, Fred, who was supremely aggressive and calculating, cool where Donald was hot, someone who believed the world was divided into killers and losers. (But in Putin’s case, it’s literal.) It took us years to find out that Richard Nixon was swilling Scotch, eating dog biscuits, talking to the White House portraits a...

Aaah.....now we know!     Trump's conduct at it's worst - and not unexpected. Read first, in this piece (re-published here in full) from The Age , the mayhem caused by the ban on various people entering the USA....and then the underlying selectivity of the ban. "Washington: This is the face of selective, lily-livered hate. Donald Trump holds it in his heart, but he manufactures it too, masking state-sanctioned religious persecution as a national security endeavour – all to stoke the "us and them" hysteria that drove his election campaign. US President Donald Trump's executive order temporarily barring visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries and banning Syrian refugees indefinitely will likely land his administration in court. As Trump severed the torch-bearing arm from the Statue of Liberty and the US went dark overnight on Friday, American airport arrival halls and departure lounges around the world became settings for heartbreak, frustratio...

The CEO and National Director of the American Anti-Defamation Commission in an op-ed piece on Haaretz , responds to Trump's ban on refugees entering the US.... "History will look back on this as a sad week in the United States — as the week that the president turned his back on people fleeing for their lives, in defiance of a proud promise indelibly inscribed on the Statue of Liberty that America will provide safe harbor to the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” President Trump signed an executive order on Friday to stop refugee admissions for at least several months, including shutting the door to all Syrian refugees; drastically reduce the annual cap on refugee admissions to 50,000 annually; and temporarily bar even visitation to the United States from some Muslim majority countries. With more than 65 million people forcibly displaced from their homes, today the world faces the worst refugee crisis since World War II. Sadly, as we in the Jewish communit...

“Trump is ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency,” Roth told the magazine in a string of emails. He “wield(s) a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”                                                                                                            - From Forward Perhaps a more measured, but no less trenchant,...

The Scientific American is hardly a rabid publication, yet it calls out the actions of the Trump administration with regard to facts .    What makes the piece troubling is what it reveals (and not seemingly reported elsewhere)......the almost wholesale dismantling and immediate cessation of all manner of work by government agencies, curtailing the release of information, challenging unquestionable facts, etc. etc.  As the magazine says.....at the time of writing Trump had only been in office for 5 days! "But it’s not just absence of facts that’s troubling, it is the apparent effort to derail science and the pursuit of facts themselves. Already, we have learned that multiple agencies, including the USDA and the EPA, have ordered their scientists to stop speaking to the public about their research. The CDC suddenly cancelled a long-planned, international conference on the health impacts of climate change. And when the Badlands National Park started using its Twitter...

It is hard to believe that it has only been one week that Trump has occupied the White House......yet he dominates the news with his extraordinary actions and those surrounding him.   Think "alternative facts" as just one, small, dimension to the last week's "goings-on."    Far more troubling are Trump's actions and views on things like torture, women's rights, that wall between Mexico and the US, trade between countries, etc. etc.      What CommonsDreams reveals in this piece ought to be most concerning for "ordinary" Americans.... "In Philadelphia on Thursday, President Donald Trump seemed to reassure his party that he supports right-wing budget priorities like those embraced by House Speaker Paul Ryan—whose past budget plans have been denounced as "cruel," "draconian," "a massive cut-off of state funds to the most vulnerable population in the country," "going after what Americans want, on issue a...