Doodler

 So the faux president is gone and the government is actually working after a 4-year chaotic interregnum, purchasing more vaccines, developing an actual distribution plan, restocking the science departments with scientists, giving press briefings and dispensing useful information, all the stuff that's been missing since 2016.

The butcher's bill for the Trump-incited sacking of the Capitol on January 6th by a murderous mob of delusional fantasists has come in--scores of injuries to the responding police from the insurrection including brain injuries, spinal injuries, a heart attack, stabbings, cracked ribs, eye issues, 3 dead policemen (2 by suicide) and over 30 covid cases.

Trump's troops built a gallows on the Capitol grounds and went looking for VP Pence chanting "Hang Mike Pence," and Nancy Pelosi with the intention of murdering her and other Democrats.

A sick bunch, those Trump idolators.

Doodle

 The January 6th assault on our democracy, the sacking of the Capitol by an insane, murderous mob incited by our faux president who lost the November election by a landslide on the electoral college and by over 9 million votes popularly, inspired me to express myself by trying my hand at political cartoons.

I give credit to the Metropolitan Police for responding with alacrity at the Capitol in force to aid the beleaguered Capitol Police, who were seriously undermanned on such an important day (they knew the electoral college votes were being certified before both full houses that day and that a typical mob-like Trump rally was going to occur barely a mile away) for reasons unknown, and saving our democracy.

White power white supremacists took over the citadel of Western democracy (the last, best hope of mankind) for a few hours until they were pushed out by other arriving police forces from around the region.

Now the terroristic occupants are being rounded up by the feds from whatever backwoods corners of the country they slunk away to after the mayhem and charged, as they all should be, every single one of them; the charge that I think fits practically every one of them is felony murder.

Happy Birthday, Dad

 Happy Birthday, Dad.

"Near us an older woman with her coat thrown over her house dress slipped to her knees and rested her head against the back of the next pew. She knelt for a long time, oblivious of the hymn, and her body sagged a little. It takes time to tell the Lord about her two sons in battle."

The above is an excerpt from "D-Day," written in 1944 by newspaper columnist Gretchen L. Lamberton, my grandmother, in The Casual Observer in the Winona Daily News, describing herself in the 3d person as being among several other anxious parents, wives, siblings and children in a small Minnesota town, praying in church on the day of that tremendous battle that Made America Great.

 

One son, my Uncle Harry, was already committed to battle against the Japanese, returning home late the next year with a Bronze Star commendation.

Another son, a teenager, was already overseas and would soon enter 180 days of horrific combat in two island battles, where casualties ran 35% in each campaign. He was slated to be in the first wave of the projected invasion of Japan, with a million casualties expected, if the war hadn't ended sooner.

 

That Marine corporal was my Dad. He would have been 96 if he hadn't died 35 years ago. I love you Dad and Mom, and still miss you both!

MLK, Jr. day

 Two holidays and a birthday in January; two birthdays and a holiday in February.  No luck in January but I'll keep trying at least through next month.

Yesterday on the MLK, Jr. holiday I went at noon to the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover where I parked right in front of the door to the gourmet pizzeria, went in and ordered a Greek Pizza to go and when it was ready, took it out to my car to enjoy it in it as I listened to a rock station on Sirius radio.  It is the pandemic after all and I didn't want to eat inside the restaurant, although it offers limited indoor dining.

I ate a slice of the pie, a delicious mixture of fresh tomato slices, marinara sauce, feta cheese, onions and olives, a vegetarian's delight, as I watched the people going in and out of the eatery for the hour I was there.  I didn't see anyone I recognized, although since I haven't seen any of my three children since they were minors (they're all in their thirties now) I might be hard-pressed to know them if I saw them, but they surely could recognize me and in any case no likely candidates age-wise passed through the door of the restaurant.

Leaving some uneaten as a talisman for their hoped for appearance at one of the holiday/birthday dates next month, I drove away wondering at the compassion/humanity traits these three boys-turned-men might possess or rather, not possess.  That's not how I was raised by my family.

Relations

 It's the MLK long holiday weekend.  Monday is the holiday and I'll be at the Lost Dog enjoying a pizza during the noon hour then, as has been my custom for well over a decade on almost every holiday and family birthday in the hopes that my three estranged children will someday come out of their juvenile delirium, induced by their mother and her coterie of paid "professionals" during the divorce long ago, and appear now that they are all fully mature adults.

Maybe one or more of them grew up to be Trumpites and they'd be in town anyway getting ready to further trash our democracy on inauguration day and they'd pop over for lunch on Monday between dry runs through government buildings, fire extinguisher tossing drills, noose fashioning and speed trials on flex cuffing Democrat politicians and any political leaders they might happen to catch.  I wouldn't know, I haven't talked to any of them since Peyton Manning won his first Super Bowl when they were all minors (the serious malady is called PAS or Parental Alienation Syndrome).

PAS causes emotional disaffection and lack of commitment later in life when adults successfully practice this form of child abuse on minors, so I hope they're all okay, now that they're all in their thirties and could be expected to have families of their own.  My goodness, two of the three have conditions which qualified them for special education when they were in public school, and I always fought for every benefit they were entitled to, something which can't be said for their mother who never thought education was all that important, in my observation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great American, something which couldn't be said for anyone associated in any way, even merely by tacit approval, with the assault on American democracy on January 6th.  My three children were great kids but ain't it funny, or sad, how things can turn out.

Two Times

 Our faux, totally unqualified and incompetent, not to mention thoroughly corrupt, president has been impeached for a second time, in just his first term.  Anybody who had even a second grade education in 2016 could have seen this coming if they spent even an instant evaluating him, yet a minority of voters put this con man in the most important office in the world without this huckster, megalomaniacal narcissist having demonstrated a single skill set that was remotely associated with the awesome job of being the caretaker of our great country and the leader of the free world.

Charlottesville, the Muslim ban, failed or no health care reform despite lavish BS promises, separated families at the border, caging children after tearing them from the arms of their mothers and not even keeping adequate records to reunite them later, asking or extorting foreign leaders for help, factual or made up, against his political opponents, using chemicals and the military and a polyglot collection of dark agency forces on peaceful demonstrators, phony evangelicalism, corporate welfare, cronyism, etc. etc. etc.; transgressions against the American way too numerous to adequately list.  And that was before his monumental and continued failure when the coronavirus showed up on our shores as his intelligence and medical briefings told him it surely would.

A ruined economy, worse than the Great Recession (a Republican gift), the worst since the Great Depression (another Republican gift), due to his botched response to the covid crisis along with 390,000 and counting deaths in less than a year to the infection that were largely unnecessary due to his criminally negligent lack of a response, an unresponsive and sluggish vaccination rollout because he's too busy playing golf and tweeting out his grievances to orchestrate anything except for the pardoning of his criminal henchmen etc. etc. etc.  It's all epitomized by his insane suggestion last spring that maybe shining powerful lights into the body or injecting bleach into the lungs would be a cure for the virus, and then there was the election, the Big Lie and the first coup attempt in America history.

He lost his re-election campaign (and the Senate, to go along with losing the House in 2018) by the same "landslide" electoral college amount that he won by in 2016, and he lost the popular vote by over 7 million votes, with Biden capturing a distinct majority (not just a plurality) of the votes cast.  So he baselessly and fraudulently claimed the election was stolen and cajoled feckless and spineless Republican politicians into attempting to reject voters' ballots and substituting their own choice (him) and in conjunction with that he incited an armed mob of his cultish supporters to march on the Capitol on January 6th to take over the people's house, disrupt the electoral college vote, try to hunt down political opponents to hang them and several persons were killed in the pitched battle that ensued that ended with the insurrection failing and democracy surviving, for now, by a thread.

Kujo

 This past week the US has been faltering, 4,000 deaths a day to covid, hospitals at maximum capacity and starting to triage, nobody able to figure out the who, how or where of getting a vaccine, and the president spends his time on sending an armed mob to storm the Capitol to try to capture and maybe hang the legislators and overthrow the Republic.  Hmm, let's go get a takeout pizza.

I went to the Lost Dog at noon earlier this week, parked just outside its front door and went in at the stroke of noon to order a pizza.  First I went throughout the restaurant, which had limited inside seating for dine-in, and then into the men's room to wash my hands, but I didn't see any thirty-something person with a flower in his or her lapel.

I ordered a Kujo pie, a pizza with artichoke hearts on it.  I waited outside in my car for it to be prepared then went inside again to pick it up when they called to say it was ready.

I ate it in my car while I sat there by the door to see if anybody I knew entered the restaurant, but I didn't recognize anybody so celebrating Johnny's birthday was like all those birthdays for years where I have dined with the empty chair, in this time of pandemic, with the empty passenger seat.  When I was done with my slice, leaving the rest of the pie as a good luck talisman for next month, I went to the post office across the street to mail off a present to the birthday boy, a book about the first WW2 battle my dade fought in, a grandfather he never met, using an address I found recently on the internet on a voter registration form.

Happy birthday, son.  I'd like to see you but I wouldn't like to be you.

Stay away

The Proud Boys and other far right-wing fringe Internet scum are assembling in my city once again to seek out mayhem and perpetrate violence (they knifed at least four persons in the District the last time they slithered into town) on behalf of their loser of a president, a traitor in his own right as he foments sedition in plain sight every day in his desperate bid to illegally stay in power.  Mayor Muriel Bowser has asked all DMV residents to stay out of the District while these rabble rousers are in town so as not to cause them to go postal on other Americans in their hyped up fantastical state.

I'll honor the mayor's request so as to not potentially stoke the violence those miscreants initiate.  Besides tomorrow I have something else important to do at 12 noon.

I remember back now fondly the Tea Party people who came to the District a decade ago in droves with their silly tri-corner hats and flagpoles to which the coiled snake flag was attached.  They were annoying but not dangerous like this current breed of nutty conspiracists.

Meanwhile over a dozen GOP senators have turned treasonous and will try to overturn a lawful righteous election tomorrow, a shameful turn for the Party of Lincoln, led by chief traitor Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Yale Law School graduate who then clerked for a supreme court justice.  My dad went to Yale Law School and he must be spinning in his grave right now.

Johnny, I hardly know ye

 John Henry Lamberton, thirty-something, soon to have a birthday.  My middle child.

I haven't seen hm since, oh, 2003, maybe.  I really don't know when I last laid eyes upon him or heard his voice.  When the days stretch to weeks then the weeks stretch to months then the months stretch to years then the years stretch to decades, who's keeping count anymore?  The last communication I had from him was a letter I received from him in 2006 asking me to sign the waiver for the prepaid Virginia college tuition plan I paid for and owned to be used for his benefit to pay for his full college tuition and fees for four years, which of course I did.  I know he used it all up because the administrators of the plan informed me four years later that its eight semesters payments for VCU (a formerly black university in Richmond that had become a safety school for white students from the much better public high schools in Northern Virginia who couldn't matriculate at UVA or William & Mary or even VT)  had been fully exhausted.  I assume he graduated although I don't know that for a fact because I never heard from him again after 2006, not even an invite to his graduation or a thank you note.  This was the situation created by his mother's multi-year quarter million divorce proceedings against me (my costs, although I did recoup $50,000 in court-ordered sanctions and court costs from her for her "harassment petitions" using our three minor kids as straw men in her litigations against me).  Her name now is Sharon Rogers Lightbourne, and you're welcome, Johnny.

I loved Johnny, as I loved all three of my sons.  Although I was portrayed in my many years of coaching ,managing and watching them playing youth sports as a sideline tyrant by her and her friends (funny that they all kept their kids on my teams and then represented under oath that the very next season they were going to remove their kids from the team), I enjoyed their growth as boys and noted their unique personalities during those years.  I remember Johnny, the least athletic but the most cerebral of my three boys, being a plodding but steadfast fullback in soccer who prevented many goal chances and once, when the goalie was sprawled a dozen feet from the goal mouth after a partial block but the deflected ball was heading inexorably towards the wide open net,Johnny came in from the side, having circled around, and swept the ball away.  In football he was an offensive lineman whose coach said at the year-end banquet that Johnny was always at his side whenever he wasn't in and had a question after every play and an answer after every ejaculation the coach shouted out.  I don't know Johnny anymore, obviously, now that he is a fully mature adult responsible for his own choices, but I will always regret that Sharon and her paid and craven coterie of enabling family wreckers thoroughly overborned his immature will as a child during the divorce wars.

I'll be at the Lost Dog Cafe at noon on his birthday, as always for the last dozen-plus years, hopeful that he and any of his brothers and other significant others will show up (none ever has).  I'll have a presenter him  that will be representative of his Lamberton grandfather whom he never met (he died at age 61 before Johnny was born), a man's man, a mensch, who would be a sterling example for my sons if their juvenile minds hadn't been poisoned maliciously against all Lambertons by the childhood wreckers employed by Sharon and her own devious manipulations best described as classic Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), which many regard as a form of child abuse.

  

The Tree

 There is a tree on my block that I think is beautiful in its unadorned state, bereft of a covering of leaves.  Once a day at dusk I go out, whenever I am able, to photograph the sinking sun framing it, here's last night's version.

I enjoyed the dusk on December 18th.

I thought the November 27th sundown was tremendous.

Not to be outdone, the milieux on November 26th was spectacular.

This year's profile picture

The New Year came in rainy and cold, an inauspicious beginning to what has to be a better year.  On my Facebook page I posted this year's profile picture, taken December 31st on my porch by a friend while we celebrated the passing of 2020 with a shot of 100 proof 12-year old bourbon.  Good riddance to 2020!

This is the opinion that I posted on FB as to the year departing:

Celebrating with some 100 proof bourbon putting the 2020 sh*#show behind us, made lethal by our traitorous president; and eagerly awaiting for his corrupt and seditious sh*#storm, brought to us in 2016 by a distinct minority of pathetic "victimized" Amuricans whose states apparently didn't get enough of a plentitude of federal handouts from the more productive and harder working coastal states, to be put behind us in three more weeks, as failed a national experiment as Prohibition.