Created by Susan Eckenrode with image attribution if known. Click on any thumbnail to begin a slideshow.
Author: Mary
Stand Up and Be Counted!
Once to every thinking person
comes a moment to decide
whether to improve or worsen
life for those who share the ride.
In a culture populated
equally by right and wrong,
half are glorified; half hated.
All must rise to get along.
Those who choose the path of kindness
have a duty to the horde
lacking empathy whose blindness
simply cannot be ignored.
Never will the sound of silence
in the wake of cruel deeds
be acceptable. Nonviolence
doesn’t mean “abandon needs”.
Standing up for truth and justice,
quell the panic, lest we fall
for a web of lies that thrust us
straight into the devil’s thrall.
Citizen of earth and nation
striving for the common good,
raise a thundering vibration
over every neighborhood.
Only in a coalition
born of passionate desire
can a movement gain volition
going forward through the fire.
ccby 2020 Mary Boren
The two opening lines are borrowed from a hymn written by James Lowell Russell in 1845.
The Man Who Broke Democracy
The voters of his scenic state are lagging near the bottom
in economics, education, health care, yet he’s got ’em
unwittingly submitting to repeatedly renewing
a covenant of lies to keep
compliantly complicit sheep
co-authoring democracy’s undoing.
Constituents uphold him as a prime Kentucky wonder.
Electing him was second to the most unlucky blunder
Americans have ever made. His forty years of scheming
attest to values plasticized,
a cancer that’s metastasized
throughout the land with open lesions streaming.
Applauded as a brilliant strategist, he is enabled
by unrepentant colleagues whose integrity’s been tabled
in favor of the golden calf that feeds their lust for power.
But if the final story’s told
their legacy of slimy mold
will darken history’s pages but an hour.
ccby 2020 Mary Boren
2019 Memes
Created by Susan Eckenrode with image attributions if known. Click on any thumbnail to begin a slideshow.
2018 Memes
Created by Susan Eckenrode with image attributions if known.
Trumperwocky
‘Twas silly, that Republicans
should slay the nation in their wake.
All tipsy were these hooligans:
a hateful thirst they cannot slake.
“Beware the Trumperwock, my son,
the mouth that lies, the tiny hands!
Beware the veepish Pence and shun
their noxic falsehoods ‘cross the land!”
So festooned with my Bernie sword,
I set out on a norble quest
I’d see that truth was fin’lly heard,
I’d argulate more than the rest!
And there before me, heinidous,
appeared the poutic Trumperwock,
I knew him by his blondrousness,
and tiny, wrinkled… um… yeah… sock.
One two! A.M.! A twitter rant
that substitutes for governance,
Resounded in covfefe chant,
embarrassing his presidance.
“And hast thou slain the Trumperwock?”
My sad reply a peevly “Nay!
His Trumpanzees vote as a bloc,
they’re smart as Donald’s bad toupée.”
And so America was slain
by fatallacious verbal spew,
belonging to a human stain
whose age is more than his IQ.
—
© 2018 Thomas Horton
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Verdicts Speak Louder
PBS reports: Trump avoids mention of Cohen, Manafort legal drama at West Virginia rally
Hours before the rally, Manafort was convicted in federal court in Virginia on eight counts of financial crimes. Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to eight felonies, including breaking federal campaign finance law by arranging payments to two women who said they had sexual relationships with Trump before he became president.
Trump has denied the relationships.
He called his supporters to gather
And whipped them up into a lather.
But Cohen and Manafort
Had a bad day in court:
Bigger news than the president’s blather.
2018 Colleen Anderson
Half-witted Wall
Quoting from the Herald Tribune article, “Trump border wall would waste billions“:
The U.S. Government Accountability Office has just published a report saying the Trump administration has no idea how to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and even if it did, the cost would be monumentally more than estimates.
The GAO provides facts on a non-partisan basis to Congress about federal spending. Obviously, nothing there to interest Trump.
The 49-page report issued this month was done because, in January 2017, Trump signed an executive order calling for the construction of a wall. Since then the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has built eight prototype panels that stick up in the desert in an Orwellian kind of way.
One major problem, says the GAO, is that the agency’s “strategy did not include analysis of the costs associated with deploying barriers in each location or segment, which can vary depending on topography, land ownership, and other factors. Without assessing costs, consistent with leading practices for capital decision making, CBP does not have complete information for prioritizing locations to use its resources in the most cost-effective manner.”
In other words, Trump is wasting billions — and wants to waste billions more — on a border wall because nobody involved considered the cost of building each segment or who owns the land. Possibly worse, the border protection people selected locations for barriers without assessing where they were needed to prevent illegal border crossings.
In other words, this is no Hoover Dam that will awe people for generations.
His boasting and bragging wear thin.
Trade wars are not easy to win.
And that half-witted wall,
If it rises, will fall
Like the wall that divided Berlin.
2018 Colleen Anderson
Children in Cages
Quoting Splinter‘s article “Children in Cages, a Symbol of Trump’s America“:
Children being separated from their parents and put into chain-link cages. That image will forever remain a symbol of President Donald Trump’s America.
Trump has already backed away from this cruel directive, which was carried out at the southern border during the first weeks of his administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, but most of the 2,300 children taken from their families, most of whom come from Central American nations, have not yet been returned to their parents. And the situation still doesn’t seem to be a matter of urgency for his administration. I suspect that if they’d been American children, the response would have been completely different.
We’ve had presidents, wise and courageous,
Whose legacies shine through the ages,
But when this one is gone,
His disgrace will live on:
A thug who kept children in cages.
2018 Colleen Anderson
Shout Out
Quoting The American Prospect’s article entitled “Voter Registration is the Real Resistance“:
The 2018 midterm elections will test whether resistance to President Trump and anger over his policies can turn out enough progressive voters to buck both the orchestrated assault on voting rights and historic midterm election voting trends.
From partisan and illegal gerrymandering to onerous voter-ID laws to the absurd Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, the Trump administration and red-state lawmakers are working on many fronts to prevent and dissuade large numbers of eligible voters from exercising their most fundamental constitutional right. The target of these efforts—single women, millennials, and minorities—are the three groups of Americans most at risk of disenfranchisement and the most likely to support progressive causes and candidates—but only if robust registration efforts reach them.Continue reading …
Single women, millennials, and minorities—the Rising American Electorate (RAE)—make up nearly 59.2 percent of eligible voters. But these citizens don’t register to vote or turn out in proportion to their share of the population. In 2016, even though they accounted for nearly six in ten members of the vote-eligible population, the RAE made up a little more than half (52.6 percent) of the total electorate.
He’s ranting and raving and tweeting a storm
and making his hatefilled incitements the norm.
Complicit Republicans holding the reins
are holding their tongues too while counting their gains.
No need to revisit each trumpian word
their quiet subservience clearly occurred.
Where silence is deafening, people take note,
our loudest resistance is heard when we vote.
cc 2018 Susan Eckenrode