eaWe'd navigated the carefully metered line out front, allowing a dozen customers to enter at a time, used the complimentary towelette to wipe any latent virus off our faces and the shopping cart handle.
Once inside, it felt we'd just been given an all day pass to an amusement park and could pick any offering in the whole damn place.
We settled on just the eggs, a bag of elbow macaroni, a package of pepper jack cheese and a 32 count Hill Country Water. Our refrigerator and pantry could benefit from a few days of zero grocery shopping.
Ana just served me a desert she calls kamote/banana-q, with the bananas that grow in town sliced and caramelized, along with sweet potato. Wonderful!
A movie that's been playing in the background, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, just finished with a tragic, melodramatic ending. Ana had already seen it in the Philippines on Netflix and is in texting contact with her former classmates in the U.S. and family back home.
As may be evident by my lack of blogging, I'm simply bored with politics. No, not a late life crisis, but more of a life reinvention, with more focus on the future than might be typical for a person in their seventies.
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Is that your wife Anal in the last photo?
ReplyDeleteThe Trump Republicans and Moscow Mitch are doing what they know how to do. They have no idea how to govern. But when it comes to giving more money to the wealthy in this country and big corporations like the failed Trump tax cut did, the Trump Republicans led by Moscow Mitch want to do it again. No protective gear fir healthcare providers to help the sick. No ventilators to help the sick. No testing kits to know where this disease is and who is infected in this country. But give big Corp and the wealthy more money the Trump Republicans and Moscow Mitch are behind it 100 percent.
ReplyDeleteWe could survive the virus epidemic and mollify Trump this way: Appoint ex-President Obama to handle the big problems - the response to the coronavirus and steps to bolster the economy. President Obama has the experience. He handled the Ebola virus and he helped the U.S. recover from Bush's Great Recession.
ReplyDeleteThat would free up Trump to do the things he does best - speaking at pep rallies, tweeting insults, name-calling, watching Fox News and repeating talking points.
President Obama could be let go after saving America again and Trump could claim credit for everything being solved.
Wow you are lucky you found eggs!
ReplyDeletePUTIN/TRUMP 2020
ReplyDeleteFrom The New York Times: Frequently Asked Questions
ReplyDelete- Would most people who are receiving Social Security retirement and disability payments each month also get a stimulus payment?
Yes.
HOUSE PASSES STIMULUS BILL:
ReplyDeleteHere's what's in the bill:
Direct payments: Americans will receive a one-time direct deposit of up to $1,200, and married couples will get $2,400, plus an additional $500 per child. The payments will be available for incomes up to $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 for married couples. This is true even for those who have no income, as well as those whose income comes entirely from non-taxable, means-tested benefit programs, such as Social Security.
The false praise grows and grows until a new reality is formed around inconvenient facts, thus shielding both the false praisers and Trump from the reality that all those attaboys were for nothing but fluffing his massive ego. His carefully constructed ego preserving reality will crumble then we will see the depths of his depravity.
ReplyDeleteRock bottom hasn't happened yet. Not even close. His fluffers are still in place. His attaboy bubble is still decidedly in tact. We haven't seen the real Donald Trump, not yet. But when that bubble bursts, we will bare witness to the real person our disgusting president is and the real danger a man in his position with his demeanor can put our country in. Buckle the fuck up folks, shit is gonna get UGLY
This is a time, above all, calling out for a leader who can bring us together through our shared experience of vulnerability and uncertainty. Frankly, it's a time custom made for a struggling president to soothe the nation, call upon our collective strength, and reassure us that we can endure, that the dawn is coming, and that we will arise from this tragedy a stronger, more unified country.
ReplyDeleteAmericans are hungry to hear this message and many would be eager to embrace it, even from a leader they disliked, if it bore any relationship to their experience of this moment. Unfortunately, we have a leader who is too delusional to be grounded in the realities of this disease, too sociopathic to feel the fear of the nation he leads, and too broken to know how to bring the country together around the shared goal of winning this war. He is a self-declared wartime president without the vision, the prowess, or the humanity to rally the troops to defeat our common enemy. In fact, Donald Trump is almost bizarrely - indeed grotesquely - unfit to rise to this political moment.
Trump cost America trillions of dollars by dismantling the CDC’s pandemic response team, throwing the pandemic response plan into the trash (literally) and his lack of action and dismissive statements while countries like South Korea and avoided the levels of economic and human cost that the United States will suffer because of trump.
ReplyDeleteTrump has trashed the U.S. economy with his horrifically bad decision making process, THIS NEED TO BE HUNG AROUND HIS NECK AND TATTOOED ON HIS FOREHEAD FOR THE COMING ELECTION….he’s doing to the U.S. economy what he did with Atlantic City, his multiple bankruptcies, his self destroyed Trump airline and his destruction of the USFL football league.
He’s a born failure and a “fucking moron”. If he hadn’t inherited $500 million dollars we would have never heard of him. He probably would have just been just another small scale NYC grifter, maybe doing some time in Rikers Island and maybe a short stint in a NY State correctional facility, but unknown to the general public.
Just when you think the low-life tainting the White House with his spoor cannot sink any deeper, he reminds us there’s just no line he won’t cross. Donald J. Trump proves every single day that even a deadly crisis won’t alter his feculent M.O.
ReplyDeleteTrump accusing healthcare workers of stealing facemasks and other equipment!
Nothing to see here, just CBS News reporting on an audio recording of a call between Donald Trump and state governors in which Trump says, in response to requests for more testing kits, "I haven't heard anything about testing in weeks."
ReplyDeleteIn weeks? Nobody has bothered to tell Donald Trump, theoretical president, "anything about testing" in weeks? During a nationwide emergency? One in which a lack of testing is the defining feature of both the early containment failures and the timing of when "social distancing" measures can be lifted? After Mike Pence promised “4 million” tests, a number that drifted off into parts unknown soon afterwards?
In weeks?
GO-TO PLAN FOR MAYOR MENDEZ:
ReplyDelete1.) Enact immediate moratorium on PUB bills (to be reviewed monthly)
2.) Enact immediate suspension of Metro fares
3.) Furlough of non-essential city employees at 50% salaries
4.) Suspend all non-essential contributions to city entities not based at City Hall
5.) Dispense checks of $300 to all city taxpayers (exceptions being delinquent accounts and those on payment plans to county)
6.) Suspend all City of Brownsville employee travel
7.) Enact a return to city coffers of pay allotted for the City Commission members
8.) Initiate an immediate $20 tax (infraction ticket) on all citizens out in public for no reason (groceries, medical, relatives visits ONLY exceptions)
9.) Bill City of Matamoros a similar fee for its citizens in violation of local shelter-in-place
10.) Withdraw from any regional or state organization requiring city participation fees.
That's just the beginning.
A PLAN FOR MAYOR MENDEZ, part 2:
ReplyDelete1.) Convene top business leaders and wealthy residents. Objective: work to help the city and the city's poor
2.) Work toward having these rich residents fund grocery bag deliveries to the poor side of town
3.) Announce a "No One Goes Hungry" program aimed at aiding any resident in need
4.) Authorize free cab rides for anyone needing transportation to the grocery store, doctor or pharmacy. Enlist cab company owners by promising city vouchers payable later in the year
5.) Staff a 24-hour City Hall hotline to be manned by city employees able to respond to a non-police or fire emergency.
- o -
No matter that Donald Trump says about the Coronavirus, that does not mean he did a “good job.” It means that, with months of warning and near-infinite resources, he did a worse job than every other government on the entire planet — a job so awful that when a decade from now someone is unlucky enough to think of Trump, this is what they will remember. This is all they will remember:
ReplyDeleteThere was a crisis, Trump failed the nation, and the cost was many, many times worse than 9/11.
Here is a hard truth for my political reporter friends: If you are not being harshly critical of Trump you are doing it wrong. His performance, beyond debate, warrants harsh criticism. And sustained criticism is just about the only thing that will change his behavior.
ReplyDeleteSo do your job. And that includes not showing his campaign rallies masquerading as press conferences live.
People are dying because of his screw-ups. What are you, the press, doing to stop it? And yes, it’s your job.
STATE OF THE CITY
ReplyDelete...Now is the time for dilettante Mayor Mendez to hold a "real" State of The City during which he would give the community a full report on what it's doing against the Coronavirus.
- Have Dept. Heads answer questions that are on the minds of residents
- Have City Manager Noe Bernal outline what he and his staff are doing
- Update on local virus statistics
- What's the immediate future hold for Brownsville?
- What is the city doing for its large number of poor?
- Is the City Commission preparing itself for the day when they'll get back to work?
- Identify problems residents may not know about
- Speak to the idea of hanging tough and weathering the pandemic
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In the wake of Trump's boasting of "big, strong, powerful" companies stepping up to provide desperately needed services in a pandemic that is likely to kill at least 100,000 Americans, ProPublica went looking for instances of Donald Trump's own companies providing similar charitable support. As in, any. Even a bit.
ReplyDeleteThey couldn't find any. As high-end New York City and Chicago hotels stepped up to provide rooms for medical personnel or isolated patients, did Trump's own hotels step forward? Nope. Did any of Trump's myriad properties offer up hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies, or anything else? In California? In Florida? Virginia?
Anywhere?
Nope.