Here’s a cool thing-

Wheels of Good Fortune: Transforming Lives Through Free Wheelchairs

Don Schoendorfer’s nonprofit delivers more than free wheelchairs to people in developing countries. It delivers dignity and hope — and transforms lives.

Ken Budd

Wheel man: Don Schoendorfer shows off his foldable, third-generation wheelchair, which his charity distributes for free around the world. (Photo courtesy Free Wheelchair Mission)

The first thing they see are our feet,” says Don Schoendorfer. The organization he founded, Free Wheelchair Mission (FWM), delivers wheelchairs to people with disabilities in developing nations, from Uganda to Brazil. When Schoendorfer and his team arrive, recipients are often on the ground, lying on their stomachs. Some drag themselves with their hands.

“They’ve looked up at people their whole lives,” Schoendorfer says. “When you get them into a chair, they often break out in happy tears. And they look different than when they were on the ground. Suddenly the dignity they never had is coming back. You give them a hug and they don’t want to let go because they’re crying. And you look around and the whole family is crying.”

Schoendorfer has seen this “phenomenal change” on multiple continents. FWM has distributed over 1.4 million wheelchairs in 95 countries since he founded the nonprofit in 2001, driven by the low-cost wheelchair he designed and constructed in his garage. The wheelchairs have improved over the past 23 years, but they’re still cost-efficient. For just $96, the Irvine, California-based organization can build, ship, and deliver a wheelchair anywhere around the world.

Schoendorfer was the right man for this globe-trotting mission. “He has this scrappiness — he can make something out of nothing,” says Nuka Solomon, the organization’s CEO. And he was born to build: His father was a machinist for the New York Central Railroad.

“My father taught me and my two older brothers about mechanical things,” he says of family life in Ashtabula, Ohio. “I knew I was going to be an engineer.”

It wasn’t easy. When his two brothers went to college — one became a civil engineer, the other a chemical engineer — his parents told the then-eight-year-old Schoendorfer that little money would remain for his education. He needed to improve his grades and start saving money, Mom and Dad said. He did both. For 10 years, the future engineer had a paper route. He earned an undergraduate degree from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT.

Two years later, he experienced a life-changing moment. He and his wife, Laurie, were on vacation in Tétouan, Morocco, when they saw a woman on the ground, crawling with her fingernails, digging them into a dirt road.

“She was pulling herself, one hand at a time, a few inches,” he remembers. “I suspect she had polio. She was bleeding. Her clothes were shredded. And people were stepping over her, not wanting to touch her, not wanting to help her, not wanting to talk to her.”

The woman disappeared down an alley. Schoendorfer and Laurie looked at each other and thought: Why did we see this?

The image was planted in his mind. But for the next 20 years, Schoendorfer continued a career in biomedicine. He enjoyed the work and holds more than 60 biomedical patents. His life started to change when the oldest of his three daughters, then 13, began a long struggle with bulimia. Schoendorfer had always been religious — his father was the sexton of a small Congregational Church — and as their daughter fought her illness, he and his wife “surrendered to the Lord.”

“I think we need to do this,” he told Laurie. “We’ve got to figure out how to get help from God.”

The battle with bulimia, he says, was a “dreadful” time for his family. But they were going to church on Sundays, and his spirituality was deepening. And then, God spoke to him.

“The way I sum it up, it was like a phone call in the middle of the night,” he says. The voice told him he was wasting his time; that he wasn’t using his gifts. “And then this vision of the woman trying to get across the dirt road was right in front of me,” he recalls. “It had been sitting there for 20 years.”

**A world of difference:** Free Wheelchair Mission has touched 95 countries, including Armenia, Morocco, Vietnam, and (shown here) Peru. (Photo courtesy Free Wheelchair Mission)

His priorities changed. Schoendorfer identified around 20 organizations that distributed wheelchairs. Together, however, the nonprofits had only donated about 100,000. That number seemed low. His idea: To increase donations by developing a less-expensive wheelchair.

He started at a local shopping center. Home Depot had white resin lawn chairs for $4 each. Toys’R’Us sold bicycles made in China for $60.

“From what I know about manufacturing, those wheels probably cost about $3 each to make in China,” he says. “So for $10, I had the two most important parts: The chair and the back wheels.”

He showed a prototype to the pastor of his church, who had just returned from a mission trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The timing was remarkable. The pastor had seen numerous people who needed wheelchairs — and it had weighed on him.

“There were people crawling, and here you walk in with a solution three days later,” the pastor told Schoendorfer.

That moment convinced Schoendorfer to keep working. Soon he had 100 homemade wheelchairs in his garage. Then his wife saw an announcement for a medical outreach trip to Chennai, India. He could only take four wheelchairs with him — and his fellow volunteers, mostly doctors and nurses, were not impressed.

“It didn’t even look like a wheelchair to them,” he says. “It was a bright white patio chair with mountain bike tires. And they tried to make me come to my senses by asking logical questions like, ‘Who’ll do the training? Where’s the money coming from? Who’s going to give them out? How are you going to deal with repairs?’ And I said, ‘Listen, my main point here is to prove this works.’”

That opportunity came on a visit to Chennai’s suburbs. A family had carried their son three miles on a dirt road to reach the team’s makeshift clinic. The son had advanced cerebral palsy. He seemed agitated. He had uncontrolled contractures of his arms and his legs, and he’d been carried by a hot body in 100-degree heat and 100 percent humidity. Schoendorfer pulled down a wheelchair from the top of the medical team’s white bus.

“The mom put her son in the wheelchair. She started pushing it around and he started to calm down,” he says.

They drove the family back to their village. The home was a roughly 8-by-10-foot cinderblock structure with a corrugated tin roof. Inside was a hammock and a pen on the dirt floor for their son. They were thrilled by the wheelchair — but suddenly, the medical mission’s director told Schoendorfer they needed to leave. Now. The team had forgotten to ask the elders for permission to enter the village. The group scrambled into their bus, but villagers blocked their path.

And then the boy’s mom approached with two glasses of water.

“We were leaving without the wheelchair, so she realized it was a gift,” he says. “And in her culture, you had to repay a gift with a gift. The only thing she could afford to give us was water.”

After that first experience — and similar emotional encounters when he distributed the other three wheelchairs — Schoendorfer’s mission changed. Originally he planned to conduct clinical trials in India and write a paper. But the medical mission’s local partners drove him through Chennai to show how many people were disabled.

“They wanted to be a distribution partner,” he says. “They wanted more wheelchairs. They were so far ahead of me. I never thought of anything like that. I wanted to just write that paper.”

Fate intervened. Two weeks later, back in California, Schoendorfer returned to work. It was a Monday morning, but the parking lot was empty: The company had gone bankrupt while he was in India. Meanwhile, at his church, the story of his donations had spread through the congregation. Schoendorfer planned to get another job — his wife wasn’t working at the time — but his fellow parishioners shared a different vision.

“They said, ‘No, no, you can’t do that. This is going to be your job,’” he says. “They knew what God was doing. I didn’t. They said, ‘These aren’t coincidences. I’m going to send you some money so you can make more wheelchairs.’ And I said, ‘Please don’t — I’ve still got 96 in the garage.’ But I started to think. … Maybe this is what God wanted me to do.”

After 15 years as a stay-at-home mom, Laurie went back to work, and Schoendorfer focused on wheelchairs. He bought a book — Nonprofits For Dummies — and founded FWM. That same year, he found a manufacturer in China.

The wheelchairs are distributed by local partners in each country where they work. “We’re giving them out as quickly as we can have them made — and as quickly as we can get the money to have them made,” Schoendorfer says.

The wheelchairs have evolved since that first simple model. The next two versions were more adjustable, more comfortable, and built to last in tough terrains. The third-generation model has a fold-up design, which makes it easier to carry on buses.

“We’ve also learned the importance of adjusting the wheelchair and training people on how to use it. That was something we didn’t do in the beginning,” he says. “If it doesn’t fit right, they won’t use it.”

The demand remains great. Roughly 80 million people worldwide — most in developing countries — need a wheelchair, according to the World Health Organization.

“It’s an emotional event because many have been waiting their whole life for a wheelchair,” Schoendorfer says. “And when they get one, many of them tell me… This is a miracle.”

(Note from me: This is not a religious post. Though helpful people feel that they’ve been led to do things, they did the things themselves. Either way, a great, great service is being done! That’s why I posted this story.)

As Ten Bears has reported-

How climate risks are driving up insurance premiums around the US – visualized

‘Tight correlation’ between premium rises and counties deemed most at risk from climate crisis, experts say

Concern over the climate crisis may evaporate in the White House from January, but its financial costs are now starkly apparent to Americans in the form of soaring home insurance premiums – with those in the riskiest areas for floods, storms and wildfires suffering the steepest rises of all.

A mounting toll of severe hurricanes, floods, fires and other extreme events has caused average premiums to leap since 2020, with parts of the US most prone to disasters bearing the brunt. A climate crisis is starting to stir an insurance crisis.

Across all US counties, those in the top fifth for climate-driven disaster risk saw home premiums leap by 22% in just three years to 2023, compared to an overall average of a 13% rise in real terms, research of mortgage payment data has found. The Guardian has analyzed the study’s data to illustrate the places in the US at highest risk from disasters and insurance hikes. (snip)

“This has been the canary in the climate coalmine, and it’s now hitting households’ pocketbooks,” said Ben Keys, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and co-author of the research. “You can deny climate change for whatever motivations you have but when insurance is going up because you live in a risky area, that’s hard to deny.” (snip-MORE)

The graphics on this article are Amazing, and should be seen. But I couldn’t get them to embed this time, so please click through.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/05/climate-crisis-insurance-premiums

Peace & Justice History for 12/5

(Barfbag alert for the 2002 entry. But it is US history.)

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december5

US economy grows at 2.8% pace in third quarter on consumer spending

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/us-economy-grows-28-pace-quarter-consumer-spending-116269393

The American economy expanded at a healthy 2.8% annual pace from July through September on strong consumer spending and a surge in exports, the government said Wednesday, leaving unchanged its initial estimate of third-quarter growth

ByPAUL WISEMAN AP economics writer

November 27, 2024, 8:39 AM

The American economy expanded at a healthy 2.8% annual pace from July through September on strong consumer spending and a surge in exports, the government said Wednesday, leaving unchanged its initial estimate of third-quarter growth.

U.S. gross domestic product — the economy’s output of goods and services — slowed from the April-July rate of 3%, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

But the GDP report still showed that the American economy — the world’s largest — is proving surprisingly durable. Growth has topped 2% for eight of the last nine quarters.

Within the GDP data, a category that measures the economy’s underlying strength rose at a solid 3.2% annual rate from July through September, up from 2.7% in the April-June quarter. This category includes consumer spending and private investment but excludes volatile items like exports, inventories and government spending.

Still, American voters — exasperated by high prices — were unimpressed by the steady growth and chose this month to return Donald Trump to the White House to overhaul the nation’s economic policies. He will be supported by Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of U.S. economic activity, accelerated to a 3.5% annual pace last quarter, up from 2.8% in the April-June period and fastest growth since the fourth quarter of 2023. Exports also contributed to the third quarter’s growth, increasing at a 7.5% rate, most in two years. Still, the third-quarter growth in both consumer spending and exports was lower than the Commerce Department initially estimated.

But growth in business investment slowed sharply on a drop in investment in housing and in nonresidential buildings such as offices and warehouses. By contrast, spending on equipment surged.

When he takes office next month, President-elect Trump will inherit an economy that looks broadly healthy.

Growth is steady. Unemployment is low at 4.1%. Inflation, which hit a four-decade high 9.1% in June 2022, has fallen to 2.6%. That is still above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, but the central bank felt satisfied enough with the progress against inflation to cut its benchmark interest rate in September and again this month. Most Wall Street traders expect the Fed to cut rates again in December.

Wednesday’s report also contained some encouraging news on inflation. The Federal Reserve’s favored inflation gauge — called the personal consumption expenditures index, or PCE — rose at just a 1.5% annual pace last quarter, down from 2.5% in the second quarter. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core PCE inflation was 2.1%, down from 2.8% in the April-June quarter.

The public still feels inflation’s sting: Prices are about 20% higher than they were in February 2021, just before inflation started picking up

Trump has promised an economic shakeup. On Monday, for example, he vowed to slap new import taxes on goods from China, Mexico and Canada. Mainstream economists view such taxes — or tariffs — as inflationary. That is because they are paid by U.S. importers, who then seek to pass along the higher costs to their customers.

Wednesday’s report was the second of three looks at third-quarter GDP. The Commerce Department will issue the final report on Dec. 19.

___

This story has been corrected to show that consumer spending rose at the fastest pace since the fourth quarter, not the first quarter, of 2023.

Letters From An American for 11/17:

This is pretty cool to read!

November 17, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson Read on Substack

Tonight is a break from the craziness of the news.

I often say that 1883 is my favorite year in history because of all that happened in that pivotal year, and one of those things is the way modernity swept across the United States of America in a way that was shocking at the time but that is now so much a part of our world we rarely even think of it….

Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones.

Fifteen minutes before the time of the shift, the telegraph company Western Union shut down all telegraph lines for anything but the declaration of the new time. It identified the moment the new time went into effect in telegraph messages to local railroad offices and to the jewelers known in cities for keeping time. In offices that got the message, men had their timepieces in their hands and ready to reset when the chief operator shouted “twelve o’clock!”

In Boston the change meant that the clocks would move forward about 16 minutes; in New York City, clocks were set back about four minutes. For Baltimore the time would move forward six minutes and twenty-eight seconds; in Atlanta it went back 22 minutes.

The system was a dramatic wrench for the rural United States, bringing it into the modern world. Uniform time zones had been proposed by pioneering meteorologist Cleveland Abbe, who developed the U.S. system of weather forecasting. Having joined the United States Weather Bureau as chief meteorologist in 1871, he recognized that predicting the weather required a nationally coordinated team and worked with Western Union to collect information about temperature, wind direction, precipitation, and sunset times from across the country.

Coordinating that information required keeping time across all the stations he had set up. To do so, Abbe divided the United States into four time zones, each one hour apart, and in 1879 he suggested those zones might smooth out the chaos of the railroad systems, each trying to coordinate schedules across a patchwork of local times. Railroad executives, who were concerned that if they didn’t do something, the government would, listened to Abbe, and by 1883 they had concluded to put his new system in place.

Members of the new professional class who traveled by train from city to city were on board because they thought the need to regularize train schedules was imperative. But standard time was controversial. In the United States, people had operated entirely by the rhythms of the sun until the establishment of factories in New England in the 1830s, and most people still lived by those rhythms, their local time adjusting to solar time according to their geographical location.

Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”

The mayor of Bangor, Maine, vetoed an ordinance in favor of standard time, saying it was unconstitutional, that it changed the immutable law of God, that the people didn’t want it, and that it was hard on the working men because it changed day into night. Those planning for a switch to standard time tried to ease fears by providing that Americans would operate on both local time and standard time, with both times represented on clocks.

On November 18, no one quite knew what the dramatic wrench into the future might mean.

What did it mean to gain or lose time? Many people expected “a sensation, a stoppage of business, and some sort of a disaster, the nature of which could not be exactly ascertained,” a New York Times reporter recorded. As the great moment approached, people crowded the streets in front of jewelers to see the “great transformation.”

They were disappointed when, after all the buildup, the future arrived quietly.

The New York Times explained: “When the reader of THE TIMES consults his paper at 8 o’clock this morning at his breakfast table it will be 9 o’clock in St. John, New Brunswick, 7 o’clock in Chicago, or rather in St. Louis—for Chicago authorities have refused to adopt the standard time, perhaps because the Chicago meridian was not selected as the one on which all time must be based—6 o’clock in Denver, Col. and 5 o’clock in San Francisco. That is the whole story in a nut-shell.”

—

Notes:

Chicago Daily Tribune, “At Noon today Most of the Railroads Will Discard the Old and Adopt the New,” November 18, 1883, p. 12.

Boston Daily Globe, “Modern Joshuas: They Make Clocks, If Not the Sun, Stand Still,” November 19, 1883, p. 5.

Boston Daily Globe, “At the Railroad Stations, At the Churches,” November 19, 1883, p. 5.

Washington Post, “New Time in Other Cities,” November 18, 1883, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune, “Standard Time,” November 19, 1883, p. 1.

Indianapolis Daily Sentinel, November 21, 1883, p. 4, Quoted in Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 144.

New York Times, “Time’s Backward Flight,” November 18, 1883, p. 3. https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5748

Robert E. Riegel, “Standard Time in the United States,” American Historical Review 33 (October 1927): 84–89.

CBPP Statement: November 14, 2024 – For Immediate Release

Republican Economic Proposals Would Harm the People Trump Promised to Help

Statement of Sharon Parrott, CBPP President, on key priorities for the 2025 policy agenda

While the new President and new Congress will not take office until early next year, they have already put forward an agenda — through Project 2025, Republican budget plans, and campaign proposals — that would increase poverty and diminish opportunity. Their proposals would raise costs for basics like housing, food, and health care and take health coverage away from people; slash funding for schools where our children learn, roads and bridges we use to get to work, and scientific and medical research that improve our health and strengthen our economy; double down on tax giveaways for wealthy households and corporations while imposing tariffs that fuel inflation; and further widen already glaring differences in people’s well-being and opportunity across income, race, and ethnicity.

These policymakers campaigned on promises to make the economy work better for people without big bank accounts who are trying to get ahead. But their proposals to date seldom match those promises.

Instead, a policy agenda designed to advance economic opportunity and racial justice and help families make ends meet would:

Make it easier for people to afford housing, food, health care, and prescription drugs.
Support children and families with an expanded Child Tax Credit, especially for children who don’t get the full credit today because their families’ incomes are too low; more affordable child care; and investment in our schools so that all of our nation’s children get what they need to thrive.
Invest in the things that will keep the economy strong and growing, including basic building blocks like roads, bridges, and research, as well as protections that keep our communities’ food, air, water, and workplaces safe.
Support these investments with a fairer federal tax system that requires wealthy households and corporations to pay their fair share and strengthens our fiscal outlook.
Create an immigration system that recognizes the critical role that immigrants and their families play in our communities and the economy, eschewing harsh deportation regimes that separate families and embracing reforms that provide people with a workable opportunity to gain legal status and a pathway to citizenship.

This kind of policy agenda would build toward a nation where everyone — regardless of their income or their background — can get the health care they need, afford to put groceries on the table, live in safe homes and strong communities, and have the income, education, and child and home care they need throughout their lives. And it would reflect the truth that our nation succeeds only when all of us succeed.

We are eager to work with policymakers who put forward policies that advance this agenda and we — together with our partners — will work hard against policies that make people less economically secure, less healthy, and have less access to opportunity.

Could “Rosie the Riveter” Be Chinese American?

Despite having their citizenship withheld before the war, Chinese American women in the Bay Area made significant contributions to the wartime labor force.

Could “Rosie the Riveter” Be Chinese American?

By: H.M.A. Leow

Amid the social upheaval of World War II, women entered the American workforce on an unprecedented level. And, for younger Chinese American women in the San Francisco Bay Area, the war made it possible to smash not just entrenched gender barriers, but racial ones as well.

“To a large extent, the war provided an entry for Chinese American women into the larger American society, something for which their ancestors had struggled a hundred years,” writes historian Zhao Xiaojian, who argues that second-generation Chinese American women “grasped the wartime opportunity to enter the larger American society” by joining the Bay Area’s defense industry.

“Partly because of a scarcity of English-language sources on this topic, some scholars simply have assumed that Chinese American women did not share the experience of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’” she reports. But she uses newspapers, company records, and oral histories to push back on this view.

Many Chinese American women already worked out of economic necessity. Yet racial discrimination and social isolation typically restricted them to jobs in Chinatown enclaves.

“It was difficult for many Chinese American women to go outside their communities to work, even when they wanted to,” Zhao explains. “The decades-long isolation had also limited the ability of immigrant Chinese working women to communicate with the outside world.”

During the war, women were also encouraged to adopt domestic roles—preparing “nutritional food” for their families and “show[ing] our fighting men that we are… absolutely behind them.”

But World War II still marked a major turning point—especially for younger, unmarried daughters of Chinese immigrants. Many of these women had either a high school or college-level education.

“With relatively few household responsibilities, in contrast to their mothers, they had the freedom and independence to work outside the home,” Zhao writes. “Since most of them were already living in the Bay Area before the war, these younger Chinese American women were among the first American women to join the Bay Area’s defense labor force.”

In fact, Zhao’s research turned up only four women who were older than forty during their wartime jobs. Still, those wives and mothers capably juggled their duties at home and on the home front. (snip-More; it’s a worthy click!)

sanewashing and wishcasting: how the press continues to fail us

by Jeff Tiedrich

if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay Read on Substack (Language NSFW, as always with Jeff Tiedrich’s writing)

the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media utterly failed us during the 2024 campaign season.

New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn came right out and said it: defending democracy is a ‘partisan act,’ and we won’t do it — and, fuck us all, the press kept their word, and didn’t do it. they enthusiastically put their fingers on the scale for Donny Convict.

arguably, the media’s worst transgression was the sanewashing — the cleaning-up of Donny’s incomprehensible blitherings, to hide his obvious cognitive disintegration and make him sound coherent.

a minutes-long disjointed word-salad about how tariffs on Chinese goods were going to lower the cost of childcare became “a major economic speech.”

Donny’s inability to keep his increasingly-demented mind on the topic at hand — his crazypants pinballing from they’re eating the dawgs to Hannibal Lecter wants to have you for dinner to would you rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted — was explained away by Donny as his brilliant “weave.”

that explanation, to The New York Times, “did all sort of seem to make sense.”

post-election, the media has mostly moved on from sanewashing, and has now jumped feet-first into wishcasting.

what’s wishcasting? over to you, Wiktionary.

[Wishcasting is] the act of interpreting information or a situation in a way that casts it as favorable or desired, despite the fact that there is no evidence for such a conclusion; a wishful forecast.

sure enough, the media has now gone into overdrive, churning out piece after piece in which they promise us that if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay.

not twelve hours after the election had been called for Donny, the Times wasted no time in assuring us that the election of a vindictive fascist is an amazing opportunity for vindictive fascism not to happen.

as I wrote three days ago,

the New York Times can fuck all the way off.

what kind of magical, everybody-gets-a-pony thinking is this? just fucking stop it.

did Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat both experience some kind of recent head trauma that has caused them to forget the years 2017 through 2020? Donny’s first presidency was a dumpster fire of corruption, mismanagement and mass death — but somehow now, given a second chance to fuck shit up worse, Donny’s going to bring us an “American renewal”?

anything’s possible, right? overnight, Donny Convict could magically become a wise and fair statesman — also, technicolor pigs could fly out of my ass.

oh my god, the media never stops imagining that Donny is going to somehow become presidential. during his first term — over and over — every time Donny stopped short of taking out his dick and pissing on the floor, the press would fall all the fuck over itself in a mad dash to proclaim him presidential.

spoiler alert: Donny never became presidential. not from the the first time he threw a ketchup-hurling tantrum in the White House, to the moment he absconded back to his Florida golf motel, taking with him boxes of stolen classified documents.

now, what the small-batch artisanal fuck is this?

the premise here is that if we’re respectful to Donny — if we fucking kowtow to him, and stop opposing him — he’ll be nice to us in return. he’ll become — dare I say it? — presidential.

Stop indulging the fantasy that outrage, social stigma, language policing, a special counsel, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or impeachment will disappear him. And stop talking as if normal political opposition is capitulation.

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery.

Mike Luckovich, explain to the nice people at the Atlantic why they’re living in a fever-swamp fantasy world.

news flash for Newsweek: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are not going to save us.

okay, I will grant that Newsweek may be half right. Lisa Murkowski seems to genuinely loathe Donny, and we can probably count on her to vote against the worst of his fuckery — but Susan Collins? the credulous naïf who assured us over and over again that Donny had learned his lesson, and would never transgress again?

now, let’s bask under some rays of hope from people who aren’t just blindly wishcasting, but are actually offering reasoned arguments.

in the middle of a fairly clear-eyed assessment of the Trumpian horrors to come, the Guardian gives us this:

Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “For him to expand presidential power, Congress has to give up power and they’re not in the mood to do that. They’ve never done that. There are plenty of institutionalists in Congress.”

Kamarck also expressed faith in the federal courts, noting that judges appointed by Trump only constitute 11% of the total placed on the bench by former presidents. A Trump dictatorship is “not going to happen,” she added. “Now, there might be things that the president wants to do that people don’t like that the Republican Congress goes along with him on but that’s politics. That’s not a dictatorship.”

here’s Tom Nichols, in a piece titled Democracy Is Not Over.

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

here’s Adam Serwer, from There Is No Constitutional Mandate for Fascism.

Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.

I sure hope to fuck they’re right.

This is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means disengaging with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

FWIW-here are some rays of light

WONKETTE NEWS ONE A DAY

Happy Happy Joy Joy! Sarah McBride Shows Trans Strength And Pride.

And we are feeling it! Yes we are, shut up! I SAID BE HAPPY, DAMMIT!

CRIP DYKE NOV 06, 2024

https://www.wonkette.com/p/happy-happy-joy-joy-sarah-mcbride?r=1pk2l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Lovable policy dork and new US Congresswoman Sarah McBride gives a hug to the kid who stole my pink unicorn dress. Yes, I will sue.

How do you do, fellow Wonks! It is I, your friendly neighborhood trans woman who is happy about a thing!

What? What is with those faces? Did something bad happen? No matter! For it is my job to give you the good news, with a spring in my step and a song in my heart and I am going to fucking do that because it is my job, melonfuckers, and I will not neglect my professional duty to be happy about a happy thing. Or three!

Yesterday, for those not in the know, the United States had an election. And during this election the transgenders worked their genderqueer asses off, not only running for election to the local sixth-grade softball team but also to at least 35 political positions around the country. And while we here at Wonkette salute every single one of those eager beavers, a couple stand out for their prominence and their victories.

No trans star shines brighter in, lo, these early morning hours as I write you this, than Sarah McBride. While McBride was not the first trans person to be elected to any ol’ thing, she was not elected to any ol’ thing. She was elected to the actual Congress of the US America. That’s right! We’re talking about the very same federal legislature made famous in Schoolhouse Rock’s song “I’m Just A Bill.”

This is not particularly surprising, as like some San Franciscans we could name, she was very well qualified for the position she sought. Before coming out or even turning 20 years old she worked as a junior staffer for Delaware Governor Jack Markell’s campaign in 2008 and Attorney General Beau Biden’s campaign in 2010. Next she lobbied for adding gender identity to Delaware’s equal protection law and interned at the White House in 2012 before graduating from college. She was on this shit young, I tell ya. And after she came out that year, her story was featured on American University Radio (later rebroadcast on NPR) including an anecdote about Beau telling her that after coming out she “was still part of the Biden family.”

After graduating she went to work as an activist with Equality Delaware and used her relationships to help pass positive bills before she became the first ever out trans speaker at a major party political convention in 2016 — something she’s sure as hell going to do again now. She then went on to write a book (foreword by some dude named “Joe Biden”), work for the Human Rights Campaign as their spokesperson, and then spend the most recent four years representing 50,000 Delawareaniteishers in the state Senate.

With her resumé and the Blue-leaning makeup of the state electorate, she had this. And it showed both during her campaign and in her 57/42 victory. (Which won me five bucks.) And now she’s going to Congress to make sure that Republican dickweasel bigots have to look a trans person in the eye as they ban driving through McDonalds while trans or whatever evil-ass bill they’re proposing next January. She lists her top two priorities as universal healthcare and reproductive rights, with other big ticket items like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the union-friendly PRO Act, curbing climate change, ending mass incarceration and more. She sounds too good to be true, but she’s real and she’s going to be kicking Matt Gaetz ass in just eight weeks.

Still convinced there’s a catch? Like maybe she’s great but replaced someone greater? Worry not: The woman she’s replacing is now your new US Senator from Delaware Lisa Blunt Rochester, making all kinds of demographic firsts from a state previously obsessed with sending only white men to the Senate but which has now elected a Black woman 56/39/4.

Yeah, we could use a lot more Delawares right now.

But if you’ll excuse Hawaii for not being Delaware, there’s also some good shit doing down on the islands. Over the last few decades indigenous Hawaiians have become homeless at a horrible rate — yes, this started long before Lahaina burned to the ground. The primary culprit is a tourism-first legislature full of corporate Democrats who never met a bit of housing they couldn’t rezone for rental to visiting mainlanders. Along with other forces making housing expensive even on the continent, this has made trying to find a place to live in the state a genuine crisis, especially for the people working those low-paying service jobs catering to tourists.

While Kim Coco Iwamoto isn’t the only Hawaiian to notice the problem, she made it her mission to knock off the incumbent Speaker of the Hawaiian state House in the Democratic primary. It took three tries, but this year she managed it and put the game away in the general last night. She only takes over the district of Scott Saiki, not his speakership, and the still pro-corporate Dem majority is certain to elect another tourism-pleasing Speaker, but Iwamoto becomes a trans voice against homelessness and for affordable housing. Iwamoto didn’t start off in politics going straight after Saiki. She was actually the first out trans person ever to hold statewide office anywhere in the US as she was elected to an at-large position on the Hawaii Board of Education and then later appointed to the state Civil Rights Commission. She is experienced and determined, she knows Hawaii politics, and she’s going to get things done.

Our third and final Trans Nice Times! for this morning comes to you from Los Angeles, where for the first time ever a trans-centric non-profit was designated a voting center. You may be used to voting in gymnasiums and churches, but yesterday in West Hollywood if you wanted to drop off your ballot (or fill one out if you hadn’t had a chance to vote from home as is the norm in California these days), your home precinct was The Connie Norman Transgender Empowerment Center where instead of having to to look at posters saying, “Jesus dies a little every time you touch your cooter! Don’t be chewed bubblegum!” as you walk through the lobby to cast your vote, you instead got to see signs saying, “Trans joy **is** resistance!” Won’t that just be a hoot for the two conservatives who still live in West Hollywood?

In summary and conclusion, there is still joy in this world, like trans people who kick ass and golden retrievers who know just a little too much English.

Now ain’t that some nice times?

Send this post to a friend who needs to read it! (I thought we all needed this here. -A)

Our bed!

About 4 or five years ago the mattress in our bedroom was totally destroyed. It was way beyond the use life. I am serious while both of us were much heavier than we are right now, while my side had a big hole where my body was his side had given up and was trying to run away. He had no side wall of the mattress and was trying not to fall on the floor. One night I got so upset I demanded an end to the bullshit and insisted he remove the mattress.

So instead of buying a new mattress he decided to remove the bed frame and instead put up a high air mattress we had for when we needed to go to the hospital during a hurricane and kept for visitors to sleep on. But that was too low for my hips and back and I was constantly struggling. One night as I was sleeping the value gave out and I ended up trapped in the bed, crying for help. James heard me and came down and got me up.

So Ron overcame his hate to spend money on his own comfort and realized we couldn’t do this. Now here is where our lives are different. I figured we would get a new bed frame, a storage bed I always wanted due to our abundance of stuff and lack of space to put it, and a normal mattress from the mattress stores that cost around $1,200.00

Nope, Ron listened to James who had just spend a large amount of money on a frame and mattress from the Purple company. So Ron told me to asked me to order the new king-size storage bed that was already very high, and he and James went back and forth over what mattress we needed for it. When Ron told me that the mattress was going to cost $4,000.00 I was shocked. I was like what about this or that one advertised locally. Nope he said we need this for you and your very painful bones. I tried hard to say my bones could deal … but he wouldn’t bend. So the king size bed frame I choose because of the storage and headboard space for $1,800 he added $4,000 grand for the purple mattress.

Now I was upset but decided if he insisted, I could live with it. But when the bed arrived and we set it up, it had a weight limit of … 300 pounds. But the new mattress that Ron bought was 300 pounds itself. So before Ron and James put the new mattress on the bed, Ron added a few under the bed supports and a couple large 2x4s to run down the length of the bed.

Move to this last week as Ron was frantically trying to figure out what was happening to our south sided wall outlets on a split circuit that seemed to go mostly to the south wall and a small part to my Pink Palace including his TV and player stuff. After we went to bed about 1 am we both woke to a huge … Bang, crack, boom. We did not realize what happened until he got up a few hours later after trying hard to stay in bed and hitting me in the face accidentally.

So after a few hours he gave up and got up. We took the mattress off. And Ron was shocked. All the support legs had twisted off, and the too thin boards had warped under the weight or broke. So Ron stopped replacing the outlets and electrical work he was doing for two days … We do have priorities and not sleeping on the floor is one of them. So he got his tools including his drill and saws out, and went to work. Sadly it was a time in the month when we only had $50 dollars in our account (yes we are now among the US seniors who are very poor) so he did not buy a sheet of 1/4 plywood which he feels would have fixed the problem, instead he grabbed all the different pieces of wood he had to patch things and promised me he would buy the plywood to fix it when I got paid.

Ron sadly tries to cheer me up by reminding me our life has become management by crisis. Great news. The bed is again very strong and comfortable … even able to stand … active seniors sex activities. Below are the pictures. Hugs and loves to all. And yes the drama of our grand life continues. Hugs