When will it be time for Vance to invoke the 25th Amendment to begin the process of pulling Trump's driver's license? By Hal M. Brown

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The RawStory article title is 'Yikes': Ex-Tea Party lawmaker sounds alarm on 'cover-up' of 'Trump's cognition. The lawmaker it’s about is Joe Walsh.

Here’s the excerpt that made me think of my grandfather’s cognitive decline:

"As all of this is playing out, Trump’s health and cognitive fitness are in the spotlight again. White Housephysicians report that he is suffering from chronic venous insufficiency, which has resulted in his unsightly ankle swelling," Walsh wrote Friday. "Not a terribly shocking development for an obese 79-year-old man."

However, he said, "A bigger concern is his cognitive decline."

Drawing attention to a previous allegation Walsh himself made, he added Friday, "As you know, I’ve said there’s a cover-up going on in the White House with respect to Trump’s cognition."

"There was more proof of his decline this week, as Trump publicly questioned why Joe Biden hired Fed Chair Jerome Powell—even though he appointed Powell during his first term. Yikes," Walsh wrote.

My maternal grandfather lived with us all of my life until I went off to college. My parents moved into his and my grandmother’s house when they got married and my family continued to live there. My grandmother died when I was four and I ended up moving into their room which had two full-sized beds. 

My grandfather was a kind man. He was self-effacing, easy going, and rather passive. Prior to retiring he was a salesman in the families men’s clothing store.

His one passion aside from doting on my younger sister and me was dancing at the Y’s senior canteen where he was something of a ladies man.

Aside from liking the ladies after his wife died, he was absolutely nothing like Trump. 

In many ways my grandfather was a surrogate father since my own father worked 6 ½ days a week, left for work before I woke up and came home just in time for a 6 PM dinner. After eating he was too tired to do much more than fall asleep in front of the TV.

My father never got a driver’s license. He took the bus to work. Thinking back, I wonder if he had some kind of phobia about driving.

My grandfather and mother were the drivers in the family and my grandfather sometimes chauffeured my father around on various errands. 

By the time my grandfather began to succumb to dementia I’d already gone off to college but heard the following story which relates to Trump from my mother.

He was driving my father someplace and turned onto a oneway street going in the wrong direction. He drove for a short distance without encountering any other cars but then several cars approached and had to pull around him to avoid a collision. They were honking their horns and gesturing frantically at him.

His reaction was to happily say to my father “they know me, they know me.”

My father got him to pull over and turn around. When they arrived home he told my mother about it. They decided it was time to pull his driver’s license.

Some years later, after my mother died, he moved to Miami, Florida where other relatives had retired and he lived happily into his late eighties.

I assume you figured out the point of this story since it is my title.

When will it be time for Vance to invoke the 25th Amendment and for the process of pulling Trump’s driver’s license to begin so the elderly demented president can retire? Trump can then live out his life in Florida where he can play with his little putter and have people treat him like royalty.

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If Donnie Despot wants to make America beautiful from sea to shining sea he should watch Escape from New York and reopen the real Alcatraz, by Hal M. Brown

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This is in the news this morning:

The consensus among experts is that it would cost so much to convert Alcatraz back to a prison that it doesn’t make sense to do this despite Trump’s bellicose bloviating. He had his Big Beautiful Bill. Now he can have a “Make America Beautiful From Sea To Shining Sea Bill” by opening a Pacific Ocean Alcatraz prison.

There is a cost effective way to accomplish this. 

“Escape from New York” is a pretty good movie. I’ve watched it a couple of times.

It stars Kurt Russell as imprisaoned criminal Snake Plissken (great name) who is offered a chance to be set free if he can rescue the president who has crash landed in an Air Force One escape pod on Manhattan Island. Here’s his fictional bio.

In the movie, Manhattan Island had been converted to a prison for the most dangerous criminals. Once there the inmates are left to fend for themselves without guards. Food and water are dropped in from helicopters. Escape from the island prison is prevented by heavy law enforcement patrols with orders to shoot anyone who attempts to get off the island since it would otherwise be easy to escape. Manhattan is hardly a perilous swim from the mainland like Alcatraz.

“Escape” is a riveting and totally implausible yarn. Russell is perfect in the role of the one eyed Snake Plissken:

Alcatraz Island is approximately 22 acres in size. It is about 1.25 miles offshore from San Francisco in San Francisco Bay. I live in a continuing care retirement community which is on a little more than 22 acres and I used to live on a cranberry bog that size which we owned. It was my backyard, so I have a sense for how big this is. If you can’t conceptualize how large an area this is, you’ll have to take my word for it that this would be large enough to accommodate far more than the 700 some prisoners currently held at Alligator Alcatraz as long as nobody cared about creature comforts. 

“At any given time, Alcatraz held around 330 prisoners, with each inmate given their own cell - an unusual luxury compared to the overcrowded conditions of most American prisons at the time.” Reference with photos.

Ironically, the original Alcatraz wasn’t the worst prison to be incarcerated in.

Alcatraz already has buildings, albeit in lousy condition needing very expensive repairs to make them decent to live in. There is also an open section where tents could be set up like those in Alligator Alcatraz.

I can see several thousand inmates being held there in a cost effective way as long as nobody cared about their establishing a brutal kill or be killed hierarchy where inmates ran the prison themselves like they did in “Escape from New York.”

Trump and his heartless henchmen (and henchwomen) not only don’t care about the conditions their prisoners are held in, and brush off humanitarian concerns, they seem to revel in being able to inflict pain upon them.

There you have it, Trump. All for free from me. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

Recent:

Could Trump be satisfied as the god of golf?

Trump is addicted to power. He relishes playing the role of president of the world’s most powerful nation. He salivates at the mere thought of having world leaders kowtow to him. 

For him, the words “mister president” coming from reporters, many who he knows despise him, when he sits on his golden chair in his gilded Oval Office, are music to his ears. As I finish this Substack, he is on TV in a press conference with the president of Bahrain:

I can only wonder what the president of Bahrain is feeling and thinking as Trump brags about himself and attacks and insults Presdient Biden since he is literally twiddling his thumbs:

Trump knows his is secure in his position. He doesn’t experience a nanosecond of self-doubt, let alone a momentary thought that his presidency could be in jeopardy.

Even if the conservative Supreme Court justices all had visits from the spirits of Christmas past, present, and yet to come, and as a result they decided they'd gone too far in granting Trump the powers of a king and tried to reverse any of their enabling decisions, it wouldn't matter.

Trump would ignore their rulings. As far as he’s concerned the MAGA crown is inextricably fused to his head.

If the Democrats won back control of Congress Trump would bat a wrinkled eyelid. If laws were passed which went against him they wouldn’t be worth the paper they were printed on since he’d ignroe them.

There are only two American institutions that can stop Trump's juggernaut to cement his absolute power. 

One is the military and the other is a critical mass of the population. 

Joined together, the truly patriotic military which incudes officers who graduated from military academies which had honor codes, and at least 50% of the population who were willing to take to the streets, could become a credible force to return us to democracy.

There are several ways this could play out. If it came to potential confrontations which could result in the loss of many lives this could give Trump pause. The crucial question might end up being whether Trump want to be the president of a country engaged in a second civil war.

We can look at 1930's Germany to see what Hitler had that Trump doesn't. He had the support of the vast majority of the people and of the military.

Trump would not go silently into a golden retirement. He would kick and scream until he was confronted with the real possiblity he’d be forced out of office. 

Everyone has a psychological breaking point, even someone like Trump. If this approaches he will be at his most dangerous. Credible reports of Hitler’s last days describe him as wanting to punish the German people and military for failing to achieve his goals. 

Trump has amazing defense mechanisms to shield himself from anxiety. He could see the handwriting on the wall not for his regime but for him personally.

He could envision an escape which he could convince himself does not represent defeat. He’d frame it in a convoluted way as a victory.

If Trump knew that there was a line he could not cross before the military would stand against him, and the people would risk their lives to protest in the streets, spending his final days playing golf with people who still worshipped him and flying on his new 747 might look really attractive. He could create for himself the illusion/delusion of godlike power.

If Trump does go into the night, he will not go quietly. He’d never say anything as profound as Macbeth did about the meaninglessness of life: "it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," but he may feel that clinging to power just isn’t worth it when he’s just turned 80 and he looks to the limited time he has left.

Maybe a life of golf, glamor, and glitz will look like the most attractive alternative.

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Bondi's firing of top DOJ ethics official led me to decide it was time to turn my protest flag upside down

 

I was going back and forth about how to display my American flag at protests as I saw more people with their flags upside down signalling that the coutry was in severe distress. The next national protest is Thurday (link).

The photos above show our flags at the No Kings demonstration. You can see someone with their flag upside down.

I wasn’t sure whether enough people understood what the upside down flag meant for me to follow suit.

I wrote about this on April 26th here:

I didn’t want anyone to think I was disrespecting the flag, hence my indecision about how to display it.

I flew it this way at home on Flag Day:

I want to stop MAGA from owning the flag and their flying it as proof that it was them who were the true patriots.

There is no doubt that American democracy is in distress. Historically, at sea flags were inverted as a signal that the ship was in dire need of assistance.

If we’d been on a ship, the ship of state, and it was about to sink and we were trying to call for help by inverting the flag, we’d have already watched our vessel go down and the flag being submerged beneath the waves. We’d be trying to stay afloat in icy waters and we’d soon freeze to death, pun intended. The icebergs in our waters now carry guns.

Readers of this do not need a list of the reasons I say that Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution, and all it represents, has been cannonballed by Trump and MAGA.

I am just writing about the final wave which, for me, crashed over the ship of democracy.

We are going to one of the Thursday nationwide protests against the Trump administration which are planned for this Thursday, July 17th, to observe the five year anniversary of the death of John Lewis. We will take our flags (the USA flag above a smaller Pride flag) and signs. 

This HuffPost story was what made me decide to change the position of the flag.

See what Joseph Tirrell posted on LinkedIn in response to being notified that he was fired by clicking here 1

The term ethics is often used interchangeably with morality (see the Britannica). Ethics is typically associated with societal and institutional standards of correct and right conduct. I’ve never seen an American entity called “The Office of Morality.” The Taliban, however, does have a morality police (officially “The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice”). It enforces strict interpretations of Islamic law in Afghanistan. They impose regulations on personal behavior, mostly suppressing the rights of women. They often severely punish those who violate their rules.

If we had morality police enforcing the views about how people should treat each other with respect, the old fashioned Golden Rule, Trump who fancies himself to be the golden president, would be severely punished.

In the United States we don’t have a Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Instead we have The Department of Justice.

I wonder what a Taliban scholar who believes that their version of a department of justice is enforcing righteous values would say about the values of a country whose own department of justice just fired their top morality official.

A certain irony:

Russian dictators sent their enemies to Siberia where the winter months were nothing to sneeze at (so to speak):

Reference.

Trump and henchman Homan, along with his henchwoman Kristi-cream Noem, are sending their enemies to a hellishly hot Everglades swamp with dime sized mosquitos (reference).

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On Friday, July 11th, I received the below letter from Attorney General Pamela Bondi.

Until Friday evening, I was the senior ethics attorney at the Department of Justice responsible for advising the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General directly on federal employee ethics. I was also responsible for the day-to-day operations of the ethics program across the Department. I led a small, dedicated team of professionals and coordinated the work of some 30 other full-time ethics officials, attorneys, paralegals and other specialists across the Department of Justice, ensuring that the 117,000 Department employees were properly advised on and supported in how to follow the Federal employee ethics rules. 

My career in public service has so far spanned a quarter of a century. I started as a United States Naval Officer, graduating from the ROTC program at the University of Michigan. After a 6-year military career, I earned a law Degree from the Detroit School of Law at Michigan State University. I started at the FBI in 2006 in the Presidential Management Fellows Program. At the FBI, I worked in a variety of offices thanks to the PMF program and eventually I went to work for the FBI’s Office of Integrity and Compliance. From there, I moved to the Departmental Ethics Office at Main Justice as Deputy Director. Finally, in 2023, I was promoted to the Senior Executive Service and the Position of Director of the Ethics Office. 

My public service is not over, and my career as a Federal civil servant is not finished. I took the oath at 18 as a Midshipman to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I have taken that oath at least five more times since then. That oath did not come with the caveat that I need only support the Constitution when it is easy or convenient. I look forward to finding ways to continue in my personal calling of service to my country. I encouraged anyone who is reading this to do the same. I believe in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I also believe that Edmund Burke is right and that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing."

I received a number of calls and messages of support in the last few days. Thank you to everyone who has reached out. Be well.