Mike Pence seems to seek redemption. He owes us more. Start by saying Trump's name. He's not Voldermort. By Hal M. Brown -- NJ Today said Mike Pence eloquently carved up Trump and MAGA with the precision of a surgeon.

 

Read how New Jersey Today characterized Mike Pence’s speech at the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award ceremony last night here.

Here’s an excerpt:

In those comments alone, Pence reiterated that Trump lost the election, that election deniers (like the current vice president) are liars, and that Republicans who have kissed the ring must be replaced in order to “find our way forward as one nation.”

And then Pence — who sacrificed his political career by resisting Trump — stuck the knife even deeper into his former boss.

“When I think of that fateful day four years ago, the only heroes I saw were wearing uniforms,” Pence said.

Pence, in singling out the heroism of the Capitol police, refuted Trump’s insistence that the rioters and insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the election on his behalf were patriots who deserved pardons.

The Daily Beast’s take on this was not kind.

Their article (here) begins:

Former Vice President Mike Pence decided not to mention his old boss when he went to pick up a ‘courage’ award for defying him.

Pence received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award at the JFK Library in Boston Sunday for his refusal to endorse false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump—which made him the No. 1 target for Trump’s supporters during the Jan. 6 riots.

The JFK Library Foundation lauded Pence for “putting his life and career on the line to ensure the constitutional transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.” Despite this, Pence failed to mention Trump in his 10-minute acceptance speech.

Yesterday I wrote about how this might troll Trump into a late night rage attack against Pence and the Kennedy Library (here). You can watch the entire 50 minute ceremony here or just fast forward to Pence’s speech.

As far as I can tell Trump had no reaction to this and my hunch is that he didn’t watch it. For one thing, it wasn’t on regular TV and could only be viewed on streaming video. It’s possible segments of it will be aired on TV today.

We may never know what Pence was feeling when the following photos were taken:

Pence seemed to worship Trump like he was a deity, if not the Second Coming. 

I think he should look at his receiving this award as the beginning of his redemption, but see this only as just the first step. He’s made it clear how he feels about Trump now. Treating him as a character in the Harry Potter books who don’t dare utter the name Voldemort he should emulate Harry, Ron, and Hermoine who called him by name.

This is from an article in Screen Rant:

In the books, Deathly Hallows introduced that a Taboo curse was placed on Voldemort's name. The curse made it possible for anyone who said his name to instantly be located by the Death Eaters, giving them the ability to find whoever said it.

For full redemption Pence has to explain why he was taken in by Trump, reveal how he felt and thought about Trump and what he was doing at the time, and explain how he feels about it at present. He must offer a full throated apology and not be content to bask in the afterglow of what he did on January 6th..

Addendum: 

Steve Schmidt wrote this before the awards ceremony. He was harder on Pence than I was. Read Mike Pence is not a 'Profile in Courage' here. He begins as follows:

“Tonight, Mike Pence will receive a ‘Profile in Courage’ award from the JFK Presidential Library. Mike Pence is many things, but a ‘profile in courage’ is not one of them.

Mike Pence is an arsonist.”

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With Trump's ordering his armed thugs to emulate the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or the Waffen-SS, we might as well call the country the USSA. By Hal M. Brown There could be 10 million cold-hearted people diagnosable as psychopaths in the country to take jobs in Trump's SS.

 There are updates to this on Substack.

I made the SS illustration above by adding a U and an A to an SS. The motto of the SS was telling in the context of today's Trump regime. It was Meine Ehre heißt Treue. This translates to My honor is loyalty. Of course their loyalty was to Adolph Hitler. Certainly not all, but some of Trump’s armed thugs, whether in ICE or other so-federal law enforcement agencies, are loyal not to the Constitution despite taking an oath to uphold it. They are loyal, like the Nazis, to one person. That person is Donald J. Trump.

The Trump SS are not upholding the law unless you consider Trump’s law, “The Law.”

They are not what I’d call real cops who protect, serve, and enforce the law. A real cop may write you a speeding ticket, hopefully making you a safer driver, but they also protect you from real ciminals. They get drunk drivers off the road. They help you if you’re in a traffic accident or if someone breaks into your house. 

If your child is doesn’t come home from school you call your local police. You don’t call ICE unless you think they were arrested in a raid. I wouldn’t be confident that you’d get a reassuring response in the later case.

The people who may or may not be members of violent gangs are being treated like they are bloodthirsty beasts who, were they not chained and bent over, might turn and rip the throats out of their captors. Who wants to treat fellow human beings this way?

Whenever I see pictures, like the one below, of an ICE officer wearing POLICE on their uniform it enrages me because they don’t deserve to be called police.

I take this personally because I have had lots of experience with the police. This is because I was an auxiliary police officer for 20 years in two different cities.

I feel strongly about this because I knew dozens of police officers. In the two departments where I was an auxiliary officer I rode with regular officers countless times. What we did most of the time on late night shifts was look for drunk drivers. In Mason, Michigan our department was honored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving with their Lifesaver Award twice. As a psychotherapist one of my specialities was police stress. I had the number one website about this for years, Police Stressline, and some of my articles were published in police magazines.

Today the ultimate boss of federal law enforcement has broken, bent, or ignored the law. He is their role model. They not only don’t have an incentive to consider that what they are doing defies the Constitution, but that there would be swift retribution if they refused to follow an unconstitutional or illegal order. As for them being a decent person who feels empathy for everyone except the most brutal criminals? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Trump has a group of people roaming the country with guns many of whom have charateristics which would fit the textbook defintion of being psychopaths. So do their bosses.

Studies show that 1-3% of the US population (3% of men) are psychopaths. While this may seem like a small number, if we say the total population is around 350 million this adds up to over 10 million people. There are certainly enough of them to take jobs in one of Trump’s SS agencies.

Addendum:

This is related to this Substack: Combine DOGE and ICE and we could have an American Gestapo armed with both guns and computers. Trump could be Hitler with a giant mainframe database of undesirables who are poisoning the blood of America.

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If you can't taste the Democracy killing poison in Trump's Kool-Aid there's something wrong with you.

 

Sabrina Haake wrote Governance by deception and this prompted me to respond with the comment below.

Drinking the Kool-Aid, indeed, but this well known phrase coming from Jonestown prompted me to wonder what it would taste like. I doubt even Kool-Aid would mask the taste. The following is from a 2006 newspaper article in Australia.

....

The case is a tragedy, but a doctor says it solved a long unanswered question - what does the deadly poison cyanide taste like?

An Indian man who committed suicide left a hastily scrawled note describing the taste of the fatal toxin, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported on Saturday.

"Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid," he wrote, according to the paper.....

This leads me to wonder how brainwashed those who are drinking both his cyanide laced economic Kool-Aid and all his other poisonous policies have to be not to taste it. The sickly sweet drink may or may not mask the taste of the poison Trump is feeding the country.

Trump is using his poison to murder democracy. We don't need a taste test to verify this. We just need common sense.

Addendum: There are ways to test for actual cyanide.

To 500 to 1000 cc of the solution to be tested add 1 to 2 cc ammonium sulphide, (NH4)2S, and evaporate just to dryness. The final stages of evaporation should be done slowly. Cool, add 10 cc water, stir well, let settle, and filter. To the filtrate add 2 drops of saturated ferric chloride, FeCl3, solution. A red coloration indicates the presence of cyanide.

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30 Barbies: Not good at parenting or at the maths. By Hal M. Brown

 In the past few days we’ve had Trump or his minions prove that they probably failed their math (or as the Brits say “maths”) in grade school. 

Let’s start with the most ridiculous:

Who gives their kid 30 dolls?

Then we had this story:

As of May 2024, there are 291,000 migrant children who arrived in the US as unaccompanied minors who were set free and never given a date to appear in immigration court — meaning there is no way to track their whereabouts.

That is in addition to the 32,000 children that Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities released into the US with hearing dates but then failed to show in court, according to the 14-page report — which tracked a period from October 2018 to September 2023.

One federal whistleblower said that she believes many of these vulnerable kids could already be in the hands of criminals and sex traffickers.

Over a five year period 32,000 children didn’t appear in court when they were supposed to. One, count them, one federal whistleblower said they could be in the hands of criminals and sex traffickers. What the hell does “many” mean? Sure, they could be. But then again, how does she know? 

How about this one?

Trump’s Cabinet members, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, spoke in glowing, sycophantic terms about their boss. But Attorney General Pam Bondi took it a step further, claiming that Trump had actually saved the lives of around two out of three Americans. Bondi cited recent fentanyl seizures as the reason for this supposedly momentous accomplishment.

What about DOGE, you might ask?

MONEYWATCH

DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says.

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, says it has saved $160 billion through its push to root out wasteful or fraudulent government spending. But that effort may also have come at a cost for taxpayers, with a new estimate from a nonpartisan research and advocacy group estimating that DOGE's actions will cost $135 billion this fiscal year.

The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce.

PSP's estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE's actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn't include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS.

Then there’s the word Trump says is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. Trump hasn’t claimed that his tarriffs have saved the government, and you, one red cent. I have to hand it to him for not trying to spin that falsehood.

Oops…. refer to my first example. He’s admitting indirectly that the tarrifs are actually costing money for parents doing their Christmas shopping.

There are a few numbers that Trump can’t ignore. These are those coming from the Stock Market. He has a way to admit that the numbers are bad but has a way to spin them.

Trump insisted that Joe Biden — who has been out of office for three months — is to blame for the stock market's plummeting in response to Trump's sweeping tariffs.

As for the rest of the economy:

Whether it is Trump’s ability to estimate crowd sizes or characterize vote counts (remember his non-landslide landslide), his ability to play fast and loose with numbers is a model for his sycophants to emulate to curry favor with him. They just make up impossible numbers to show how well they are doing their jobs and he smiles and nods in approval.

I suppose one could say that it is human nature to see what one wants to see or not see even if it contradicts common sense. After all, as I wrote about yesterday, Trump looked at a fake photo of Abrego Garcia's hand and didn’t see that that it was a really bad photoshop with the added M,S, and 3 off-center.

I did a better job putting MAGA there and I am an amateur:

Back to the dolls. Even Trump’s two dolls is probably double the number of dolls a sensible parent would give to their child for Christmas. Unless they are giving their child a Barbie and a Ken most would give their child one doll. We don’t know how many dolls Trump gave Ivanka for Christmas. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave her an entire set of Barbie fashionista dolls. 

What better way to teach her how to look the way he wants her to look.

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