March For Decency

Display evoking separated children in Dayton, Ohio,
one of Satruday's protests held in 700 different cities

I definitely enjoy my day job, but if there are measurable downsides to working in the real estate industry (aside from obnoxious residents), having to work alternate weekends is certainly among them.

Back on January 21st, 2017, I was proud to be amongst the hundreds of thousands of people around the world to join the Women's March in opposition to the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Had I not had to work this past weekend, I certainly would have been one of the thousands of people who took to the streets on Saturday to express non-violent opposition to the Trump administration's needlessly cruel immigration policies.


Instead, I kicked in a few bucks to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to support their ongoing, multi-pronged efforts to support not just the rights of undocumented immigrants, but the legal rights of all Americans as well.

I felt like it was important to do something besides gripe about Trump's rampant idiocy and the ACLU has filed suit inn federal court to put a halt to the family separations - last Thursday ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, "The government's efforts are ridiculous. We can't just let the government go along the way they've been going, where kids can spend eight months separated."

Support for organizations like the ACLU, CASA in Action and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center is more critical than ever.

Especially considering that unaccompanied migrant children forcefully separated from their parents as young as three-years-old have been forced to appear in court to defend themselves.

These kinds of widely-condemned policies result from the Trump administration directing the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions to use the federal government as a tool to leverage the right-wing extremist ideology that now defines the Republican Party.

Honestly, what kind of administration directs authorities to have three-year-olds defend themselves in a court of law? If you're a parent, picture your three-year-old child appearing in court alone.

American children got a lesson in Democracy as
they marched for immigrants rights on Saturday

As NBC News reported on Thursday, Lindsay Toczylowski, the executive director of the Immigrant Defender's Law Center in Los Angeles observed,

"We were representing a three-year-old in court recently who had been separated from the parents. And the child -in the middle of the hearing- started climbing up on the table."

That's flat out unacceptable by the standards of any modern civilized society, period.


The absurdity of that kind of nightmarish scenario taking place in 21st century America is just one of the reasons that hundreds of thousands of people turned out in more than 700 different cities across the U.S. and around the world on Saturday.

Last Thursday, an estimated 633 women were arrested after they staged a non-violent sit-in inside the lobby of the U.S. Senate's Hart Office Building in Washington, D.C. to demand that Congress enact legislation to end the Trump administration's policy of separating families locking up those seeking asylum - which is legal under U.S. law by the way.

The women who participated in the D.C. sit-in last Thursday donned themselves in foil blankets to evoke the haunting images of unaccompanied migrant children forcefully separated from their parents by the Trump administration huddled in foil blankets in warehouses and other hastily-constructed migrant detention facilities.

Around midday on the same day, nearby a group of kids wrapped in foil blankets also held their own demonstration inside the Capitol Building as they chanted "Shame!" while onlookers, supporters and members of the press looked on and captured the images on social media.

Speaking of shame, considering the intentional cruelty of the draconian immigration policies enacted at Herr Trump's behest, he doesn't seem to have whole lot of it - and based on her tacky fashion choice last week, neither does his wife.

Melania Trump sports her "troll jacket" last week

Perhaps Melania Trump should consider covering her face in shame with one of those foil blankets in the wake of her odd decision to wear that offensive, tasteless green Zara jacket when she made her second photo-op visit to a Texas border detention facility last week.

With blistering Texas temperatures hovering in the 90's, Melania's decision to accessorize with a $39 olive green Zara coat with the words "I DON'T REALLY CARE. DO U?  emblazoned on the back called into question her taste, fashions sense and ethics.

In an op-ed posted on the dependably-conservative Forbes.com on Sunday, Fruzsina Eordogh called Melania's unseasonable outerwear a "troll jacket" and suggested that:

"The jacket sabotaged not just any peace and goodwill that could have been fostered by positive headlines of the government appearing somewhat competent, it also severely damaged Melania's brand. CNN talking heads called it a "PR disaster.""

Frankly I'm not loosing sleep over the damage to Melania's "brand", if she was so concerned about that she shouldn't have married a lying, twice-married serial philanderer who slept with porn star Stormy Daniels while Melania was pregnant with Trump's child Baron.

I'm not buying Donald Trump's rambling suggestion that his wife's jacket was not meant as a not-so-subtle message to the right-wing supporters who salivate over his vilification of immigrants to the United States.

Zara, the maker of Melania's "troll jacket" also made
this tasteful Holocaust prisoner shirt-thing - WTF?

From calling Mexican people "rapists", "murderers" and "drug dealers"on the first day of his presidential campaign, to his suggestion that there were some "very fine people" amongst the neo-Nazi's who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump has gone out of his way to toss out klutzy wink-wink-nod-nods to the white supremacists and extremists that he openly cultivates and panders to.

As DailyKos reported last week, Zara, the company that makes the $39 jacket Melania wore to a humanitarian crisis in Texas last week, aren't exactly strangers to controversial fashion designs.

As a Twitter user named Molly helpfully pointed out last Thursday, Zara has also come under fire for selling a shirt that looks alarmingly similar to the infamous striped prison garb worn by Jewish prisoners of Nazi concentration camps during WWII (pictured above).

They also sold a shirt that says "White Is The New Black" - really.

Anyway, kudos to the hundreds of thousands in more than 700 different cities and towns who stood up against Trump's immigration policies on Saturday.

Those mass protests last week were about more than just the way the Trump administration treats people who immigrate to this country.

It wasn't just a statement on policy, it was also a march for decency, and what the vast majority of Americans (and people around the world) think this country really stands for.

The Vulgar One

Melania & Donald in happier(?) times

A couple minutes ago a news alert from Reuters popped up on my phone with the announcement that Melania Trump has has decided to accept her misogynist husband's apology even though she found his videotaped comments "unacceptable and offensive."

For good measure the former Slovenian model added that her husband "has the heart and mind of a leader." 

Now I seriously doubt she wrote that, nor am I sure of what kind of behavior or comments pass as leadership qualities in Slovenia, but here in this country crass vulgarity that demeans women is generally not what Americans regard as reflective of the attributes of the leader of the free world.

Especially not when over 50% of the population is female, and the orange-haired candidate in question already has a lengthy track record of misogynist statements and accusations of rape.

At this moment Melania Trump may or may not be regretting the decision to stand up in front of millions of people at the Republican national convention in Cleveland and attest to her husband's character; but she has to be feeling humiliated in the eyes of the world.

Maybe she knew he was a vulgar borderline rapist all along, but if she didn't, then like millions of other people around the globe; she sure does now after the release of a 2005 video of Trump talking to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush on a bus just before making an appearance on the soap opera 'Days Of Our Lives'.

By the way, did you know that Billy Bush (born William Hale Bush) is a privileged, private school-educated scion of THE Bush family? His father Jonathan is the brother of George HW Bush, the 41st president.

Given the open contempt the Bush family has for Trump, doesn't take a genius to figure out  how the Washington Post got a hold of the now-infamous video tape of Trump.

Utah Rep Jason Chaffetz dumps Trump

While a number of high-profile Republican politicians who'd pledged their support for Trump months ago have quickly moved to publicly distance themselves from The Donald's toxic brand, it's way to late for that kind of symbolic public rebuke

Smug GOP Rep Jason Chaffetz, whose spent the bulk of the last three years keeping hearings on the exhausted specter of the Benghazi attacks on the U.S. Embassy alive in order to tarnish Hillary Clinton's reputation, told Utah's Fox 13 news, "I'm out."

The feisty self-righteous Republican from Utah joins embattled Freshman New Hampshire Senator New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte in turning their backs on Trump's presidential bid.

Locked in a tight race in New Hampshire to save her Senate seat, Ayotte's last-minute attempt to save her political ass comes just days after she called Trump a "role model" during a Senate debate with her opponent, NH Governor Maggie Hassan.

But again, it's too late for that.

Ayotte  knew she was up for reelection this fall, and despite that she's tried to have her political cake and eat it to by wish-washingly stating that she would support Trump, but not endorse him; which strikes me as a half-ass attempt to be able to capitalize on a Trump presidential victory, but protect her political self respect in the event of a Clinton landslide by being able to say she never endorsed him.

GOP VP candidate Mike Pence

Unfortunately you have to stand for something and pick a side, Ayotte did neither (especially after laughingly trying to assert that she "misspoke" after getting called out for calling Trump a "role model") and she may pay for that with her Senate seat.

Finally there's Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence.

Who so far seems to have escaped accounting for his support of discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws and draconian anti-abortion laws.

Pence embarrassed himself in the recent vice-presidential debate with Democrat Tim Kaine by pretending not to know anything about the slew of lies his running mate has uttered in the past two years.

Yesterday, in the wake of the release of Trump video, the even-tempered right-wing Indiana Governor had enough and promptly canceled a scheduled campaign appearance in Wisconsin before releasing a statement saying that he too was "offended" by his own running mate's comments and would "pray" for him.

Like the majority of the Republican establishment, Pence has to be privately fuming that he and the GOP have hitched their wagon to the vulgar star that is Trump.

Republicans can express all the righteous indignation they want to, they have only themselves to blame for the mess their party finds itself in.

They knew a monster was loose back in March during the Super Tuesday primaries, and they watched it smash through a wall and wander off into the woods.

There's nothing they can do about their monster at this point, after all they created it in their own lab with their subservience to the Tea Party and tacit approval and tolerance of bigotry, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia.

Now the monster has taken over the party of Lincoln and 'Family Values' and replaced it with something nasty and vulgar.

Can you recall a time when both a vice-presidential candidate and the presidential candidate's wife both publicly acknowledging being offended by something the candidate said?

Can't wait to see what Giuliani and Christie have to say about that on the Sunday morning new talk shows tomorrow - how do you defend the indefensible?